Stripe

Overview

Stripe is the payments infrastructure that sits between your SaaS product and your customers' money. Founded in 2010, it's the default choice for founders who need to accept payments without hiring a payments engineer. What Stripe actually does: It provides APIs and hosted checkout flows to accept credit cards, digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay), and local payment methods. It manages recurring billing, handles failed payment retries (dunning), calculates revenue recognition, processes payouts to your bank account, and abstracts away PCI compliance. Who uses it: SaaS founders launching their first paid tier. Marketplace operators managing multi-party payouts. Subscription businesses with churn and retry logic. Finance ops teams automating revenue workflows. Any founder who realizes "we need payments" at 2am and doesn't want to spend six months on it. Concrete operator scenarios: **Scenario 1: You're launching a $29/month SaaS product.** You integrate Stripe Checkout in an afternoon. Customers click "Subscribe," enter their card, and you're live. Stripe handles the PCI compliance. When a card declines, Stripe retries automatically. You get a webhook when payment succeeds; you flip the feature flag. This is the path 80% of founders take. **Scenario 2: You're building a marketplace.** You need to pay sellers. Stripe Connect lets you create seller accounts, hold funds in Stripe, and pay out to their bank accounts or Stripe balances. You set the payout schedule (daily, weekly, monthly). Stripe handles the compliance and reporting for each seller. **Scenario 3: You're selling internationally.** Stripe supports 135+ currencies and local payment methods (iDEAL in Netherlands, Bancontact in Belgium, etc.). Your checkout automatically shows the right payment method for each region. No separate integrations per country. **Scenario 4: You need revenue recognition automation.** Your finance team stops manually calculating when to recognize revenue. Stripe's Billing product calculates it based on your subscription terms and sends it to your accounting system via API or Zapier. Pricing reality: Stripe charges per transaction (2.9% + $0.30 for card payments in the US; rates vary by country and payment method). There's no monthly fee for basic usage. If you process $100k/month, you're paying roughly $3,200. At $1M/month, roughly $29,200. This is industry standard; Adyen and Square have similar rates. ACH transfers cost $0.80 per transaction. International payouts have fixed fees ($15–$25 depending on destination). Pricing changes — check the vendor for current rates. Honest limits: Stripe is not a full accounting system. You still need to reconcile payouts, manage refunds, and track failed payments. The API has a learning curve if you're not a developer; non-technical founders often hire a contractor for the first integration. Stripe's support is email-based for most tiers; phone support requires higher volume commitments. If you're processing under $5k/month, the fixed fees per transaction can feel expensive relative to your revenue. For very high-volume businesses (>$10M ARR), negotiating custom rates with Stripe or evaluating Adyen makes sense. Alternatives: Square (simpler for in-person + online), Adyen (better for high volume and international), Braintree (PayPal-owned, good for marketplaces), Paddle (handles tax and compliance for digital products). Most founders start with Stripe because the API is the most developer-friendly and the documentation is the best in the category.