It is a fair bit, but for any credit or debit card transaction they’re actually taking on the risk of essentially fronting the cost of the transaction. Well really their partnering bank does, but if something happens they’re left covering that cost. They also have to split the profit with their collaborating bank and possibly the credit card companies. Nowadays I suspect the risk isn’t all all that high, or at least not 2.9 less slim profit margin high. So in the end 2.9% isn’t highway robbery but they’re also not working on slim margins.

costco offers payment processing for 1.99% + 25c (vs 2.9 + 30c), so quite a bit cheaper.

my point is that it’s entirely possible to offer the same thing for cheaper if your main concern is cost, especially for higher volume merchants, and not optimizing for developer experience https://www.costco.com/merchant-account.html

Your point is a complete non-sequitar though? How'd it go from "Patrick is very active on HN/with developer communication!" to "yeah but Stripe is expensive"?

AFAIK they see themselves as a "premium" processor, not as a cheap one.

I don't see how that's a problem? There's no lack of payment processors, as you have noted, many with lower fees.

If you choose Stripe, you're doing so for the dev experience, their ML whatever, better testing suite, integrations, etc.

And you're doing that consciously.

there’s a high floor due to interchange fees that are set by the networks that processors have no control over.

They’re not a monopoly

i didn’t say that. but it’s among the most expensive.

As you go higher in revenue it goes down

I much prefer a company that takes a slightly higher percentage and provides a great service

than the @#$# at Paypal who will freeze your accounts for reasons like 'your earnings are growing too fast' or 'you compete with our fellow silicon valley company'

Price is what you pay, value is what you get. I’d happily pay more for my Stripe accounts. They make my life easy, and that has value.

it depends on what you value. most high volume businesses aren’t optimizing for developer happiness..they don’t want a business expense like payment processing taking 3% of every sale.

If you’re at high volume, you don’t pay Stripe retail rate.

sure - but smaller vol merchants with thin margins can also be sensitive to payment processing costs too

Is your point here that Stripe isn't the best solution for every merchant?

That's not surprising. But they seem to do what they do well, and have a lot of happy customers.

It's really not when you consider what else you have to do to accept payments from other providers. Do you research.

It really depends