Stripe 2.9% vs. Adyen 0.6% vs. Braintree 2.59%: 2026 Fees

19 pointsposted 8 hours ago
by ksec
(valueaddvc.com)

22 Comments

Taikhoom10

8 hours ago

One may be tempted to think lower fees are better, but Stripe succeeds in offering an integrated solution, where convenience and simplicity outweigh price.

https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/what-stripe-can-become-broader-...

speedz007

6 hours ago

Anecdotal, but in Singapore restaurants allow you to pay on your table via QR code. They are all Adyen.

ValentineC

35 minutes ago

How can you tell that they're all Adyen? It's not like it shows on the statement descriptor.

jatins

6 hours ago

Are restaurants directly using Adyen? I assume it’s some point of sale system like Toast or Square that’s using Adyen and all of them are using that POS system

hibikir

6 hours ago

Which makes perfect sense for face to face QR payments, as that's a very low risk payment system, in a situation with minimal fraud. Therefore, you go through a system with minimal fees. Moving far away from the expensive payment systems makes perfect sense there.

But this article's headline is already lying to you, because when you look at the table, yous ee that Stripe and Braintree include the interchange fee, and Adyen won't.

See how the Stripe percentage there does cover the entire interchange fee already. In many an online store, your median interchange fee, which is set 100% by what card the customer is using, is probably going to be over 2%. So 0.6% + interchange fee might even be cheaper than Adyen.

So the real argument IMO is whether it really makes sense for the US to keep bribing customers with points and cash back to keep people using expensive credit cards, vs the regulation in other places that limit fees, and removes most credit card bonuses, other than paying at end of month. But that's up to congress.

dbbk

6 hours ago

The fees are negotiable once you do volume anyway

pestatije

7 hours ago

> convenience

until the day they randomly cancel your account

jwr

6 hours ago

SaaS owner here (solo founder). I have been calculating this manually on a regular basis, as I've been wondering if it makes sense to migrate from Braintree to Stripe and what the cost difference would be. I finally moved, in spite of Stripe being slightly more expensive (but it's nearly a wash in my mix of currencies/accounts), mostly because of Braintree's catastrophically bad handling of 3D Secure (mandatory in the EU) and abysmally bad support.

However, people often say that Stripe's integrated solution outweighs the price (see other comments here). I disagree here. Sure, if you're just building an MVP, you want things to be up and running as quickly as possible, and you don't much care about processing fees. However, in the long term, if you run a sustainable SaaS over many years, these small amounts add up quickly. So, as an example, I do not use Stripe billing; I have my own subscription system. Because I looked at the amount I would be spending with them yearly, and realized that I prefer to have my own, building my own also gives me more control and flexibility. And independence, which matters quite a bit.

ValentineC

23 minutes ago

> However, in the long term, if you run a sustainable SaaS over many years, these small amounts add up quickly. So, as an example, I do not use Stripe billing; I have my own subscription system. Because I looked at the amount I would be spending with them yearly, and realized that I prefer to have my own, building my own also gives me more control and flexibility. And independence, which matters quite a bit.

Not only does the amount build up, but I guess there's some kind of vendor lock-in? 1% extra is far too much for this, but that's the strategy for Stripe Billing since that's not much different from using PayPal end-to-end.

tonyhart7

6 hours ago

well, you can just pass the fee to customer

jwr

2 hours ago

Let's set aside how this statement does or does not make sense in a competitive environment. Look at this from a different angle: at the end of the day, would you rather have those hundreds/thousands of dollars, or not?

Because if I could "pass the fee to customer", I might as well (raise prices), and then still pocket the hundreds/thousands of dollars.

timmg

6 hours ago

2.9% seems high. I wonder if the market will drive this down. Or if Stripe is really that good.

resonious

6 hours ago

Stripe has such a critical mass, I think SAAS builders don't even shop. It's just of course you use Stripe. It's a like a utility. I think even customers might be surprised to see a non-Stripe checkout when purchasing a SAAS. Might even get worried.

hibikir

6 hours ago

You have to read the article: 2.9 includes interchange fees, 0.6 does not. It's a really bad headline

mceachen

6 hours ago

I suspect most CFOs/CTOs fear the risk of undertaking a rewrite of your payment processor or merchant of record layers (which can be tricky to fully test even with sandbox/test environments) more than the percentage discount and opportunity cost of not shipping more features.

__alexs

6 hours ago

Anyone doing high volume on Stripe is paying IC+ rates. These numbers aren't comparable as you grow.

Arsen-V

6 hours ago

Adyen’s pricing model looks much more attractive on paper, but the integration complexity and minimum processing volumes usually keep early-stage startups on Stripe or Braintree despite the higher percentage fees.

imnotr0b0t

6 hours ago

Braintree has been sitting idle for years. It seems PayPal bought it and forgot about it. Everything works but nothing new is being added. It's fine for cards and PayPal, but if you need anything more complex, it's not even an option.

andrenotgiant

6 hours ago

slop

bartread

6 hours ago

What makes it frustrating is that the information, assuming it’s accurate, is actually useful and interesting, but it’s swaddled and interleaved in these bulky layers of unnecessary verbiage.

AI prose really is the thick crust pizza of writing.