The public can absolutely participate in this by way of syndication deals. Those syndicates are what's covering up the true extent of ownership and they're essentially charging for access with their fees. It's oddly shady, poorly regulated, and more expensive than just being public, but everyone can ride this ride.
The general public absolutely cannot. You have to be an accredited investor or qualified purchaser; you need to have access; you have to pay carry & fees (maybe multiple, stacked middlemen).
Not really. You still have to be an accredited investor AND financially savvy enough to have the awareness of what syndicate deals are and how to find them and participate.
It does seem like a lot, but if you look at growth rates, the differences are significant.
Stripe is also doing far more value-added stuff: If all you need is to process credit card Adyen is probably going to outbid Stripe. They almost always did last time I checked. But Stripe is offering a significantly larger product, especially to people running marketplaces. That was always the selling point for the doordashes and deliveroos of the world. Even for Amazon. So I bet that the skinny version that is just a payment processor would be worth a lot less.
They aren't the only ones trying to widen their horizons either: Paypal and Square/Block came up with plenty of plans to try to grow past boring payments. They just didn't execute on those things all that well, and somehow Stripe does.
PayPal is steadily decreasing in share of web payments, with the one redeeming part of their business being Venmo, which appears to be crushing Cash App.
Adyen competes primarily on price with no feature differentiation, and doesn't have the same ease-of-use.
Working at several large companies in payments areas who were Stripe customers, I'll sum up what the competition looks like by paraphrasing one of the executives I reported to: "we go to Adyen when we want to take a competing offer to Stripe for them to match".
Yes. Stripe’s 2.9% fee minus interchange (interchange is variable, on average 1.9%) is higher than Mastercard or Visa’s take of .14%.
But it’s not so simple, because Stripe faces liability for merchant fraud. If you are high volume you negotiate IC+, where the plus is .1%-.4%.
The valuations price in expected growth as well as unit economics. Mastercard doesn’t have as much room to grow because cards already saturate consumer payments.
valuation's are based on future returns, not current returns. If one believes they are growing and visa and mastercard aren't then the valuation might make a little more sense. (though I can't comment on the actualities, only the potentials).
Well, it's not exactly a fair comparison, since they're comparing a volume number with GDP, which is total value produced in a year. Volume numbers are usually much bigger than production numbers, since money moves around a lot.
If I pay a restaurant $200 for dinner and my three friends each venmo me $50 for their share, then the exchanged volume was $350, but only $200 worth of value was generated.
I cannot comprehend why there are so few companies dominating the payments sector. It doesn't seem competitive. Anyone can build a payment processor, nobody can get regulatory approval.
I also don't understand the fear around SaaS recently... People believe some weird narrative about AI replacing SaaS apps... Oh boy, people actually think that building the thing is the hard part. The entire software industry is pure crony-play; the people who run the big corporations own shares of their SaaS providers so they have no incentive to cut those contracts. Same with payment processors. I can't believe people still think we have a free market.
You can point to any company that's successful and there will be conflicts of interest all over the place. It doesn't even matter what the company does TBH. It's irrelevant.
People are just competing on who can make the money move around in circles within their group the fastest. Money certainly seems a lot more abundant when it passes through many hands and people are just buying stuff from each other.
> "anyone can build a payment processor, nobody can get regulatory approval."
If you want to become a bank regulatory approval is hard. If you don't then its necessary but not the biggest barrier by far. Building trust with card networks, merchants & banks, interfacing with card networks, optimizing acceptance rates to a high level against the black box of card networks etc.
And then you still wouldn't make any money because the margins are extremely low on processing payments themselves - so either you have to have massive scale or have a bunch of value added services that you charge more for. For which you also need a serious commercial engine to be able to sell to either loads of enterprises or some very large ones (who will rarely sign exclusive deals - they will just give you a share of wallet so they can transfer traffic over at will).
i list for you the main problems with entering this space:
criminal liability for mistakes (AML rules), you have to manage fraud, the banks which are your custody providers will constantly try and shut you down, clients expect your service on day one to be equal to mastercard, your margins are almost nothing, it is one of the most competitive industries in the world, you need to go through central bank regulations/SEC equivalent every time you enter a new market, governments in countries like Vietnam or Bangladesh or China are actively hostile to your business model, and it is HYPER competitive. anything you do well, stripe/airwallex/etc will clone immediately
Airwallex is one of the most powerful stripe competitors and the CEO is a psychopath that seems like a tv parody of a silicon valley CEO. he has to be though because so many governments, banks, competitors etc are trying to crush him constantly.
note that stripe differentiates itself heavily on checkout technology, basically making the experience of paying for things easier for the consumer.
Private markets is where the wealth is (if you invested at the bottom), as soon as Stripe goes public you're getting dumped on.
Unfortunately you need to be an accredited investor to access these markets.
This is the real gatekeeping here as rich pop stars, actors, sports stars and musicians who aren't versed in tech has more access to investing in these private companies than the academics, students in europe creating the algorithms that power them.
An 11 year old can inherit $100 million and be more "accredited" than you, even though they (may) have no knowledge of the industry, no investing experience and no years of industry experience.
Even if you have knowledge in the tech scene and you know which companies are going to go big in the future, unless you're ultra rich already to qualify as accredited, you're shut out early on.
You need an annual income of $200K to become an accredited investor. If you don't have that, you anyways shouldn't be participating in risky private markets.
If anything they should also restrict options trading, sports gambling, prediction markets etc. to accredited investors.
If you don't meet the financial requirement ($200K annual income or $1M net worth), you can also qualify as an accredited investor by passing the Series 65 exam and filing a form with the SEC.
So you have to prove that either you can afford to lose some money or you have enough investing knowledge to know what you're getting into. Seems fair.
Not all revenue is equal. Payments is interesting because the processor’s growth is directly tied to the growth of its customers. Stripe captures the vast majority of high growth SF startups. Stripe has better customers.
> Businesses running on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in total volume
I think we hackers in general also need to have a value assigned. Even open source authors generate real value but right now I see an imbalance as to who makes money and who does not. I'd even almost go as far as say that taxes (a state gathers) should go to a certain percentage value back to the open source community. There are a lot of details missing here, of course, but from a core view this only seems fair.
I'l also never forget Bill Gates anti-open source letter. That should instantly yield a 99.999% extra tax on him.
If a maintainer has chosen to open source and use a permissive license (key word chosen, this isn't a default), they are explicitly saying via their license that they are not charging for the use of the code. What's the issue here?
If a maintainer wants to make money directly from their code, they are free to charge for it, or for services around it (examples: Sidekiq, Oban, Tailwind, not to mention large examples like RedHat or Ubuntu).
Well when you're giving away your product for free... maybe open-source maintainers who want payment for their "free" products should consider going to business school?
I'm in favor of funding the arts, for example, but I'm not sure open-source is something we should tax/fund for. There is real business value in the projects that are created, but open-source maintainers insist on "giving them away for free". Start charging and then we don't need to fund/tax.
Not sure what that letter said but open source^ isn’t good and I’m what people would incorrectly stereotype as someone who would love open source as a Marxist [sympathizer].
^outside of specific scenarios where it fights back against the status quo like open source AI models.
Stripe has been doing annual tender offers. Their stance on not being public yet is that they don't need to be, as an IPO is mainly a way to raise money.
As an ex-Stripe, I understand the sentiment, and the tender offers are a nice middle ground for now, but I still would like to see them go public eventually.
The markets are skeptical at the moment. A bunch of tech IPOs in the last few years have tanked 70+% since the IPO and that can be devastating to a company.
Also there’s a ton of overhead associated with being public that nobody really wants to do so companies now stay private as long as they can get away with.
I wonder if there will be a class of VC that intends to provide LPs with income in addition to capital appreciation. If it doesn't make sense to go public, then focus on cash flow and kick of steady income to investors.
why do you figure? in some sectors, IPOs were literally 10x larger in 2023 than 2016, but i am not sure specifically about fintech. ask pitchbook. that increases IRR by a whole +1.4, just by waiting.
Investors can pressure you when you are worth single digit or low double digit billions. At $100B+ you are calling the shots, and if investors aren't happy they can sell their shares in the next tender offer.
I remember when Stripe started and it was super fun to set it up as a developer and build stuff.
Today I find it does way too much for small projects and the fees are too high. Does anyone knows of good alternatives for that? (Someone recently shared https://astrafi.com/ with me and it seemed promising, with much better fees, but I haven't tested or used anything other than Stripe)
I find Stripes fees excessive too, but I don’t think I’ll ever switch. I’ve been running a small SaaS product on the side of other work for >15 years and if it taught me one thing, it’s that I need to reduce the things I have to maintain, reduce manual work, reduce the things that can go wrong. There’s nothing worse than having to fix a bug in a codebase you haven’t touched for a year and possibly in a feature you haven’t touched in many years. I simply love that Stripe handles not just the payment, but the payment application, the subscription billing, the price settings, the exports for bookkeeping. I’ve had a few instances where my site was used fraudulently to check stolen credit cards and it was quickly flagged and I could resolve it with Stripe. I’m sure someone can mention alternatives and I’m sure that I could build something that would work myself, but they keep a big part of what it takes to run the business out of my mind and I’m willing to pay for that.
In the EU and had to switch from Stripe to Mollie due to Stripe thinking the client was a cruise company because they rent 'cruiser' boats for river leisure. Mollie was super easy to implement for them, and fees much better
I'm using Helcim here in Canada. It's not great. Stripe used to be far nicer to use, has become fairly bloated and messy, yet it's still far nicer to use in general. The developer-first roots are still apparent.
Helcim takes ages to respond to tickets. They still haven't fully set up my account after weeks. You can't just do sandboxes or dev mode by default; you have to speak to a human via email who sets it up for you and provide the test card numbers. It takes ages.
The rates are much better and once it's fully set up and integrated, I guess it'll be fine? I'm not looking forward to needing support and adding further integrations.
I guess the moral here is that Stripe has gotten worse for small projects, but it's still really good.
Braintree had $1.53 trillion TPV in 2023[0], and it's just a subsidiary of Paypal which has tanked to $40 billion market cap despite revenue and profit that are probably lightyears ahead of Stripe.
Honestly, I wouldn't touch Stripe with a ten foot poll at this valuation. Fintech is an industry that just disappoints in the end.
It would help a lot if you elaborated why it's a 'ludicrous' valuation rather than asserting that it simply is. What method are you using to value the enterprise and why does your expected result not match the actual result?
aliljet|5 days ago
beambot|5 days ago
sarjann|3 days ago
rco8786|4 days ago
dyauspitr|5 days ago
testfoobar|5 days ago
Adyen: $29.408B right now at Yahoo Finance.
PayPal: $41.51B right now.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADYEN.AS/
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PYPL/
hibikir|5 days ago
Stripe is also doing far more value-added stuff: If all you need is to process credit card Adyen is probably going to outbid Stripe. They almost always did last time I checked. But Stripe is offering a significantly larger product, especially to people running marketplaces. That was always the selling point for the doordashes and deliveroos of the world. Even for Amazon. So I bet that the skinny version that is just a payment processor would be worth a lot less.
They aren't the only ones trying to widen their horizons either: Paypal and Square/Block came up with plenty of plans to try to grow past boring payments. They just didn't execute on those things all that well, and somehow Stripe does.
Animats|4 days ago
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/24/paypal-stock-stripe-acquisit...
0xy|5 days ago
Adyen competes primarily on price with no feature differentiation, and doesn't have the same ease-of-use.
Working at several large companies in payments areas who were Stripe customers, I'll sum up what the competition looks like by paraphrasing one of the executives I reported to: "we go to Adyen when we want to take a competing offer to Stripe for them to match".
fragmede|5 days ago
syedkarim|5 days ago
rprend|4 days ago
But it’s not so simple, because Stripe faces liability for merchant fraud. If you are high volume you negotiate IC+, where the plus is .1%-.4%.
The valuations price in expected growth as well as unit economics. Mastercard doesn’t have as much room to grow because cards already saturate consumer payments.
zipy124|4 days ago
notpushkin|4 days ago
rprend|5 days ago
Centigonal|5 days ago
If I pay a restaurant $200 for dinner and my three friends each venmo me $50 for their share, then the exchanged volume was $350, but only $200 worth of value was generated.
jez|5 days ago
rough math, but:
$14.2T / $1.9T * 1.6% = 12% global GDP
unknown|5 days ago
[deleted]
antiford2049|5 days ago
hwhehwhehegwggw|5 days ago
jongjong|4 days ago
I also don't understand the fear around SaaS recently... People believe some weird narrative about AI replacing SaaS apps... Oh boy, people actually think that building the thing is the hard part. The entire software industry is pure crony-play; the people who run the big corporations own shares of their SaaS providers so they have no incentive to cut those contracts. Same with payment processors. I can't believe people still think we have a free market.
You can point to any company that's successful and there will be conflicts of interest all over the place. It doesn't even matter what the company does TBH. It's irrelevant.
People are just competing on who can make the money move around in circles within their group the fastest. Money certainly seems a lot more abundant when it passes through many hands and people are just buying stuff from each other.
alexmorley|4 days ago
If you want to become a bank regulatory approval is hard. If you don't then its necessary but not the biggest barrier by far. Building trust with card networks, merchants & banks, interfacing with card networks, optimizing acceptance rates to a high level against the black box of card networks etc.
And then you still wouldn't make any money because the margins are extremely low on processing payments themselves - so either you have to have massive scale or have a bunch of value added services that you charge more for. For which you also need a serious commercial engine to be able to sell to either loads of enterprises or some very large ones (who will rarely sign exclusive deals - they will just give you a share of wallet so they can transfer traffic over at will).
Card networks are another story...
DaedalusII|4 days ago
i list for you the main problems with entering this space:
criminal liability for mistakes (AML rules), you have to manage fraud, the banks which are your custody providers will constantly try and shut you down, clients expect your service on day one to be equal to mastercard, your margins are almost nothing, it is one of the most competitive industries in the world, you need to go through central bank regulations/SEC equivalent every time you enter a new market, governments in countries like Vietnam or Bangladesh or China are actively hostile to your business model, and it is HYPER competitive. anything you do well, stripe/airwallex/etc will clone immediately
Airwallex is one of the most powerful stripe competitors and the CEO is a psychopath that seems like a tv parody of a silicon valley CEO. he has to be though because so many governments, banks, competitors etc are trying to crush him constantly.
note that stripe differentiates itself heavily on checkout technology, basically making the experience of paying for things easier for the consumer.
colesantiago|5 days ago
Unfortunately you need to be an accredited investor to access these markets.
This is the real gatekeeping here as rich pop stars, actors, sports stars and musicians who aren't versed in tech has more access to investing in these private companies than the academics, students in europe creating the algorithms that power them.
An 11 year old can inherit $100 million and be more "accredited" than you, even though they (may) have no knowledge of the industry, no investing experience and no years of industry experience.
Even if you have knowledge in the tech scene and you know which companies are going to go big in the future, unless you're ultra rich already to qualify as accredited, you're shut out early on.
triceratops|5 days ago
Stripe being able to find all the capital they need in private markets is the actual indicator of wealth disparity.
paxys|5 days ago
If anything they should also restrict options trading, sports gambling, prediction markets etc. to accredited investors.
jonas21|5 days ago
So you have to prove that either you can afford to lose some money or you have enough investing knowledge to know what you're getting into. Seems fair.
throwaw12|5 days ago
But how is it 5x bigger than Adyen, which had 2.3B revenue and 1B earnings in 2025?
rprend|5 days ago
fastball|5 days ago
malfist|5 days ago
snowhale|5 days ago
[deleted]
shevy-java|5 days ago
I think we hackers in general also need to have a value assigned. Even open source authors generate real value but right now I see an imbalance as to who makes money and who does not. I'd even almost go as far as say that taxes (a state gathers) should go to a certain percentage value back to the open source community. There are a lot of details missing here, of course, but from a core view this only seems fair.
I'l also never forget Bill Gates anti-open source letter. That should instantly yield a 99.999% extra tax on him.
atonse|5 days ago
If a maintainer wants to make money directly from their code, they are free to charge for it, or for services around it (examples: Sidekiq, Oban, Tailwind, not to mention large examples like RedHat or Ubuntu).
Everyone involved is making informed choices.
ericmay|5 days ago
I'm in favor of funding the arts, for example, but I'm not sure open-source is something we should tax/fund for. There is real business value in the projects that are created, but open-source maintainers insist on "giving them away for free". Start charging and then we don't need to fund/tax.
unknown|5 days ago
[deleted]
skinnymuch|5 days ago
^outside of specific scenarios where it fights back against the status quo like open source AI models.
unknown|5 days ago
[deleted]
fourseventy|5 days ago
jameskilton|5 days ago
As an ex-Stripe, I understand the sentiment, and the tender offers are a nice middle ground for now, but I still would like to see them go public eventually.
baxtr|5 days ago
Public companies allow the rest of us to participate in a success story like this.
Until IPO it’s only a selected group of affluent people who have access to these private companies.
rf15|5 days ago
jameson|5 days ago
mercwear|5 days ago
cmiles8|5 days ago
Also there’s a ton of overhead associated with being public that nobody really wants to do so companies now stay private as long as they can get away with.
gamblor956|5 days ago
Private companies can say whatever they want about their performance as long as they don't lie to their own investors; public companies can't.
mattas|5 days ago
StopDisinfo910|5 days ago
pewpewp|5 days ago
ndr|5 days ago
doctorpangloss|5 days ago
stefan_|5 days ago
paxys|5 days ago
hmokiguess|5 days ago
Today I find it does way too much for small projects and the fees are too high. Does anyone knows of good alternatives for that? (Someone recently shared https://astrafi.com/ with me and it seemed promising, with much better fees, but I haven't tested or used anything other than Stripe)
Stromgren|5 days ago
jamesdelaneyie|5 days ago
steve_adams_86|4 days ago
Helcim takes ages to respond to tickets. They still haven't fully set up my account after weeks. You can't just do sandboxes or dev mode by default; you have to speak to a human via email who sets it up for you and provide the test card numbers. It takes ages.
The rates are much better and once it's fully set up and integrated, I guess it'll be fine? I'm not looking forward to needing support and adding further integrations.
I guess the moral here is that Stripe has gotten worse for small projects, but it's still really good.
krainboltgreene|5 days ago
purple_ferret|5 days ago
Honestly, I wouldn't touch Stripe with a ten foot poll at this valuation. Fintech is an industry that just disappoints in the end.
[0]https://www.paypal.com/us/braintree
jez|5 days ago
Stripe cites 34% growth for the same period and metric.
[1]: https://s205.q4cdn.com/875401827/files/doc_financials/2025/q...
boringg|5 days ago
rprend|5 days ago
jppope|5 days ago
dzonga|4 days ago
however as a comparison -- how much JP Morgan payments would be valued if a separate entity ?
miohtama|5 days ago
fergie|4 days ago
2OEH8eoCRo0|5 days ago
s_dev|5 days ago
MoonWalk|5 days ago
Disgusting rip-off of consumers, yes, but even worse is the rip-off of merchants.
gjgtcbkj|5 days ago
[deleted]