Stripe Is Now a $20B Company

So maybe I don’t understand because I’m a dumb-dumb lay person, but what does Stripe do differently from all the other payment processors that has given its rise and hype.

Is Stripe popular because its developer friendly? What makes it better than Apple Pay, PayPal, and Square? Normally, when I shop online, I’m usually given an option to type my credit card info or use my PayPal account. Where does Stripe fit into all of this?

One thing I have personally seen that, they have lower threshold for accepting clients. Maybe they rely more on fraud detection than on pre-signup verification.

Stripe is a payment processor, so when you type in your credit card info, that’s Stripe processing that payment.

The little box you type your credit card in is a huge pain in the ass for companies larger and small due to some compliance requirements from financial institutions called PCI. I can’t understate the ass pain, system complexity, legal review, etc etc that this can bring. Doesn’t matter if you are big or small, it’s painful and can be costly. Big companies can pay to handle that, smaller companies can’t and have relied on historically clunky solutions to take payments.

Stripe can make that little box you type your credit card painless, seamless and highly accessible for small and large companies. They are generally delivering a high quality experience throughout their process and many of their staff are generally awesome.

Full disclosure, I work at a big company and we use Stripe. I used to work at startups in the early 2000s and handled payment solutions. The world is better with Stripe.

You didn’t answer the question. What makes stripe different from Square?

For my side project website (see my profile), I started to implement PayPal and got seriously confused with the documentation and process (I'm not a professional developer). Mid-process I actually didn't even know if I was even dealing with PayPal or Braintree anymore. Then magically I received a package in the mail from Moneris. They shipped me a stack of those carbon-copy paper credit card slips and machine (that cha-chunk sound)... for my website. This was like 3 years ago.

I asked my professional dev friend what the heck was going on and he told me to use Stripe. Never heard of Stripe before that. Friend also told me his revenue was frozen for weeks/months by PayPal for his projects. A weekend later, I was done implementing Stripe.

My partner insisted I use PayPal because that's what everyone recognized/used, but I flat out refused after implementing Stripe.

> I started to implement PayPal and got seriously confused with the documentation and process (I'm not a professional developer)

The feeling is the same for most "professional" developers too. The old XML API is horrible by modern standards.

They do have a new one though that's less of a pain.

Stripe is a payment processor for online payments. They are a company which take those credit card details you enter and actually take your money on behalf of the shop.

Apple Pay is supported by Stripe, so it's a non-competitor (Apple Pay is just a way of giving your card details to a processor).

PayPal is the closest competitor, but their APIs are quite old (although improving) and when Stripe launched PayPal's pricing was very cmoplex. Also people just don't like the PayPal model for business.

Square is a payment processor, mostly, for physical payments mostly seemingly for hipster coffee shops. They do online payments, but nowhere near the same level Stripe do them.

Square is focused on in person card transactions whereas Stripe is focused primarily on online transactions and supports multiple types of payment method (CC, ACH, ApplePay, Bitcoin, etc). Stripe also handles outgoing payments (marketplace, top-ups, etc) and is just now getting into in person transactions.