Stripe

Stripe was founded in 2010 by Patrick and John Collison and has grown into the dominant payment infrastructure provider for internet businesses. The company processes hundreds of billions of dollars in payments annually and serves customers ranging from early-stage startups to large enterprises including Amazon, Shopify, and Google. The platform’s core product is a set of payment APIs that allow businesses to accept cards, bank transfers, and local payment methods globally. The API quality and documentation are consistently cited as Stripe’s primary differentiator. A developer can integrate basic card payments in under an hour, and Stripe’s detailed documentation, pre-built UI components, and extensive client libraries for every major programming language reduce integration time substantially compared to legacy payment processors. Stripe Billing handles subscription management — creating recurring charges, managing plan upgrades and downgrades, handling dunning for failed payments, and generating invoices. For SaaS companies, this removes the need to build subscription logic from scratch. Stripe Connect enables platforms and marketplaces to route payments to third-party sellers or service providers, handling the complexity of split payments, escrow, and payout scheduling. The pricing model is transaction-based with no monthly fees — 2.9 percent plus $0.30 per successful card transaction for standard US cards. International cards add 1.5 percent. This per-transaction model means there is no cost when there are no sales, which is appropriate for startups and variable-revenue businesses. At high volume, the per-transaction rate becomes the dominant cost and negotiation with Stripe’s enterprise team typically results in custom pricing below the published rate. The primary concern for high-volume businesses is that Stripe’s 2.9 percent rate is not the lowest available. Dedicated payment processors and direct acquiring relationships at volume can materially reduce per-transaction cost. Stripe also exercises discretion in its fraud detection and account termination decisions — some businesses in higher-risk categories have had accounts terminated without sufficient notice. Stripe is the right choice for any developer-led business building payment infrastructure. The API quality, documentation, and breadth of financial products make it the default starting point.