Stripe

What hackers pick instead

• PayPalA convenient way to pay online without handing card or bank details to every merchant, with valued buyer protection; critics warn of sudden account locks, frozen funds and app breakage.103recommend
• AdyenEU-based payment processor with a unified platform, popular with European retailers; critics say it suits larger merchants, with sales-led signup and strict acceptance.17recommend
• MolliePayment processor recommended for its easy API, developer experience and fees; critics say it turns away small businesses and handles recurring payments poorly.11recommend
• PaddlePeople recommend Paddle because, as merchant of record, it handles payments and sales tax or VAT collection, so sellers have little account setup. Critics point to its 5% cut.10recommend
• Agree payment processorOpen source payment processor praised for its design and developer experience. Critics call it a thin Stripe frontend with lock-in risk.8recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 402 comments. Each links to the original.

1. Stripe has a Get started button. You click it, fill out a form, get your site approved in maybe a day, and start making money.

   Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Gov.uk goes Dutch on payments as it dumps Stripe”

2. Point me at an API better than Stripe's with lower fees and I'll be interested but so far I haven't seen anything like that.

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Stripe Clinches over $7B Deal to Buy AI Firm OpenRouter”

3. Stripe is the least amount of friction for accepting payments online until the merchant fees become painful at scale.

   Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “Ask HN: Is anyone charging extra their customers for credit card payments?”

4. it's cool that they just let you sign up and process transactions but at some point they will look at your business

   Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Airbus Takes Flight from AWS”

5. Stripe came along and provided (1) a better dev experience, (2) better onboarding, and (3) simplified pricing.

   Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks”

6. each time they change it they add a stackable compatibility layer. So your decade old code will still work.

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Deprecate like you mean it”

7. no matter how much evidence I show, even emails with the user claiming they did it because of X, Y, Z

   Mixed · May 2026 · in “Stripe is friendly to "friendly fraud"”

8. Stripe has a Get started button. You click it, fill out a form, get your site approved in maybe a day

   Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Gov.uk goes Dutch on payments as it dumps Stripe”

9. they basically made it so easy to use them that it doesn't cost them anything to add small companies

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Gov.uk goes Dutch on payments as it dumps Stripe”

10. Stripe succeeds in offering an integrated solution, where convenience and simplicity outweigh price.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Stripe 2.9% vs. Adyen 0.6% vs. Braintree 2.59%: 2026 Fees”

11. they could really learn from Stripe: when your users are engineers, clear docs aren't a nice-to-have

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to be used with OpenClaw”

12. I have never found in any other product the level of care for devs and founders that Stripe has.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors”

13. Stripe has great documentation regarding how process looks like from merchant's customer's side

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Idempotency Is Easy Until the Second Request Is Different”

14. Stripe being slightly more expensive (but it's nearly a wash in my mix of currencies/accounts)

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Stripe 2.9% vs. Adyen 0.6% vs. Braintree 2.59%: 2026 Fees”

15. Stripe is in the business of providing a single abstraction over an enormous pit of complexity

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “OpenRouter Is Joining Stripe”

16. Stripe's authorization-hold flow can help but it's clunky to explain to non-technical sellers.

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Show HN: Auctionnow.io – Launch a store to sell items via auction or buy-it-now”

17. Stripe is offering a significantly larger product, especially to people running marketplaces.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Stripe valued at $159B, 2025 annual letter”

18. Stripe's approach, while mildly more convenient for clients, is a PITA to implement properly.

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Idempotency Is Easy Until the Second Request Is Different”

19. The subtle differences between subscriptions done through Stripe checkout and subscriptions set up yourself using Stripe elements are by turn infuriating and frustrating.

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Stripe's Payment APIs: the first 10 years (2020)”

20. Having to figure out which of the 100s of Stripe event types we need to handle and which ones overlap was the most stressful part of adopting their system.

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Show HN: We built an open source, zero webhooks payment processor”

21. Multiple businesses (including merchants in Hong Kong and other jurisdictions) report funds held for months or years with generic responses from support

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Stripe HK: Approved, paid small sum, withheld $12k via dissolved entity”

22. The thing that gets me is that Stripe boasts about their machine learning radar rules etc etc, but somehow can't feed it actually valuable data.

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Stripe is friendly to "friendly fraud"”

23. I applied to stripe recentlyish as an adult game project with excellent processing history and very low chargeback rate and got denied.

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Kickstarter Is Forced to Ban Adult Content by Payment Processors”

24. many of the warts in the API surface are there because they want to avoid changing things for fear of breaking someone else's business

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Stripe Clinches over $7B Deal to Buy AI Firm OpenRouter”

25. Stripe has also been criticised for forcing growing companies into enterprise plans the moment they hit certain growth numbers.

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Gov.uk goes Dutch on payments as it dumps Stripe”

26. Just do a search on HN for complaints about Stripe and you will likely see dozens of distressed merchants who have been cut off

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “Ask HN: How do you handle chargebacks as a small merchant?”

27. They want to know your accounts, they will force you to link it so they can reach there and claw back money for disputes etc.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Ask HN: Stripe is asking for bank statements to check financial health”

28. Stripe's system closed our account for "unauthorized charges" minutes after we completed a routine identity verification.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Stripe closed our non-profit's account with 0%”

29. more often than not, within roughly a year of implementation you'll get an email from them kicking you off their platform

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Kickstarter Is Forced to Ban Adult Content by Payment Processors”

30. Both companies known for arbitrary restrictions on what transactions can be processed and freezing or closing accounts.

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Stripe Considers Acquisition of All or Parts of PayPal”

31. Stripe has (so far) managed to avoid this, but if (when) they end up in the regulators cross-hairs they too will become like many other financial companies.

    Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “Email is tough: Major European Payment Processor's Emails aren't RFC-Compliant”

32. Slapping a Stripe integration on the backend hasn't led to Substack becoming a sustainable business not propped up by VC cash.

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Google Search as you know it is over”

33. you can't just go to Visa/Mastercard or a merchant acquirer out there and set up an account on the same terms that Stripe can

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “OpenRouter Is Joining Stripe”

34. I don't see a better way to do this, right now, than to allow Strips, or CF, to create some way to charge the crawlers.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Creepy Crawlies”

35. The Stripe interface with Link and whatnot is slick but it feels like I'm giving my credit card over to the merchant

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Stripe said to abandon $50B pursuit of PayPal”

36. Their mission is take their cut of the Internet's GDP. Nothing against them, they provide real value for that cut.

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “OpenRouter Is Joining Stripe”

37. They used to be good. When they started out their docs were absolutely far above the competition. They aren't now

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “Stripe Clinches over $7B Deal to Buy AI Firm OpenRouter”

38. Well Stripe is owned by Thiel, I'm sure there is some nefarious reason he wants to see everyone's chat history.

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “OpenRouter Is Joining Stripe”

39. Traditional API billing (Stripe subscriptions, API keys, monthly invoices) is the "bank branch" model: it works

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “ATMs didn't kill bank Teller jobs, but the iPhone did”

40. You cleave off some of the product's margin & send it to a third party so that you can get the thing launched.

    Mixed · Apr 2026 · in “Stripe's Payment APIs: the first 10 years (2020)”