Stripe review: features, fees, pros, and cons

Key takeaways

• Stripe is more than a single product: It’s a suite of financial tools and services, including online payment processing, fraud protection, and more.

• Stripe excels in flexibility and developer control, supporting 135+ currencies and dozens of local payment methods.¹ Unfortunately, realising this flexibility usually requires engineering investment and ongoing maintenance.

• For technically savvy and mature businesses, Stripe’s payments platform can be an excellent choice. But once you start adding services beyond online card payments, your costs can jump substantially.²

Stripe overview

Patrick and John Collison started Stripe in 2010.³ Its original goal was to simplify online payments by replacing functions traditionally performed by legacy banks.

Today, Stripe has grown far beyond its initial objectives.

While Stripe remains a global payment platform that can help your business accept and manage digital payments, it’s no longer a single product. Rather, it’s a platform with a collection of services and tools.

You’ll likely start with basic card payment services, but many businesses will eventually add options like subscriptions, fraud protection, in-person payments, or marketplace payouts.

This flexibility is one of Stripe’s main strengths. It lets product teams create payment flows that fit their users, instead of sticking to set templates. But it can also make things more complicated.

Pricing is split across different products, so you’ll need to look at the overall cost instead of just individual features. For example, a SaaS marketplace might need to account for charging customers monthly subscriptions, accepting international payments, and screening transactions for fraud.

What is Stripe?

Stripe’s broad suite of financial tools includes:

• Online and in-person payment processing

• Subscription and recurring billing

• Fraud detection and risk management

• Platform and marketplace payments

• Financial accounts

Who is Stripe for?

Stripe is suitable for a range of businesses, including:

• eCommerce businesses: Stripe suits online retailers looking for a branded checkout experience and seamless support for wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay. For example, Stripe Checkout is a ready-made payments page that Stripe hosts for you. It automatically adapts to your local currency and language and handles many legal and regulatory requirements. Not only that, but application programming interfaces (APIs) let businesses fine-tune storefronts, like controlling who sees discounts and when.

• SaaS platforms: Stripe is known for its flexible billing capabilities. With Stripe Billing, businesses can set up tiered pricing, usage-based models (where customers are billed based on how much they use the service), proration, free trials, and invoicing. You can also make changes to plans during a billing cycle. What’s more, you can do all of this without manual reconciliation.

• Developers: Stripe is well-known for making things easy for developers. Its APIs, software development kits (SDKs), and documentation give you precise control over payment flows, error handling, webhooks, and reporting – particularly valuable for product-led teams.

• International sellers: Stripe makes operations simpler and more efficient by supporting payments in 135+ currencies and a wide range of local payment methods. For example, businesses can accept card and bank payments in different regions without having to set up a separate provider in each country. 

Pros and cons

Is Stripe legit?

Stripe is a legitimate, widely trusted payment provider used by millions of businesses globally. It’s certified as a PCI DSS Level 1 service provider⁵, the highest standard for card payment security.

To protect your sensitive payment data, Stripe uses encryption and tokenization (where card details are replaced with a secure token for transactions). As for your customers’ card details, they’re never stored directly on merchant servers, so you can worry less about the risk of breaches. 

The Stripe Radar fraud-detection service gives you extra protection. It can defend your business from malicious actors, prevent timely and costly fraud incident follow-ups, and ultimately, protect your revenue.

Stripe detailed review

Payments

An evaluation of Stripe wouldn’t be complete without a Stripe Payments review – it’s the platform’s core offering. 

It works with credit and debit cards, local payments, and digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Using Stripe Payments simplifies the checkout process for customers and helps businesses get more payments approved. Features such as adaptive acceptance, which uses machine learning to retry declined card transactions, can improve authorization rates and increase revenue for high-volume businesses.

Pricing is straightforward. For example, online card payments in the US are typically 2.9% plus 30 cents per successful transaction. In-person payments through Stripe Terminal often cost less per transaction because there's a lower risk of fraud.

Terminal

Stripe Terminal lets your business accept in-person payments using Stripe’s own hardware. This means you can unify online and offline payments, all in a single reporting environment.

But while Stripe Terminal is an attractive offering, it requires hardware investment and technical integration. If your business has a limited physical presence, this service might be overkill.

Financial accounts

Stripe also provides handy financial tools for managing your money, like balances, payouts, and reporting. These make it easier to keep track of cash flow before funds move to your bank.

For example, marketplaces can hold funds temporarily, take their commission, and pay sellers on a set schedule. This is especially useful if your business deals with multiple parties.

While these capabilities can be useful for certain businesses, they aren’t part of Stripe’s core offering, meaning you’ll have to pay more to access them. They’ll also require additional configuration and ongoing management. 

Payments and Link

Stripe Link helps speed up the checkout process by keeping your customers’ payment information stored with participating merchants. This means returning customers can complete checkout with fewer steps, which may reduce abandoned carts and increase sales.

Importantly, Link transactions follow standard Stripe card pricing, rather than introducing a separate wallet fee.⁶

Stripe Billing

Stripe Billing lets you manage recurring revenue through subscriptions, usage-based billing, and invoicing. For example, a SaaS business can automatically bill customers based on API calls, data usage, or active seats.

Be aware that Stripe Billing can cost you about 0.7% of billing volume, on top of existing payment processing fees, so it can become costly as your business grows.

Stripe Radar

Like so many other fintech companies, Stripe is using AI to help enhance its product offering. For example, Stripe Radar uses machine learning and customizable rules to help customers spot possible fraud. You can set risk limits, block certain regions, or require extra verification for some types of transactions.

Pricing for Radar depends on how much you use it, so if your business handles a large volume of transactions, it’s important to keep an eye on these costs.

Verdict about Stripe

The Stripe platform excels for businesses with sophisticated payment needs, but it works best for teams with the technical resources to customize and maintain it. For many businesses, that’s not the case, but Stripe remains an impressive platform that has reshaped the payment processing landscape. 

Stripe isn’t always the cheapest option, especially for international or high-volume businesses. Extra fees, such as FX markups on currency conversion, flat fees for disputes, and additional product costs, can all add up. So if your business operates in multiple regions, you should figure out your actual processing rate for each currency, card type, and payment method.

For companies evaluating alternatives, comparisons such as Stripe vs Square or Stripe vs Adyen often come down to trade-offs between FX costs, enterprise features, and flexibility. But overall, Stripe’s developer tools, worldwide availability, and ability to handle complex payments make it a strong, though not perfect, choice. 

Comparing Stripe vs Airwallex

Unlike Stripe, Airwallex focuses on multi-currency accounts, FX, and cross-border payments, making it particularly relevant for businesses expanding internationally and seeking to reduce FX-related costs. If that sounds like your business, Airwallex Payments is likely an ideal fit, especially when comparing Stripe vs Airwallex.