Can anyone explain me why Stripe is so hyped on HN ?
When Stripe launched, the alternatives for a new or small business that wanted to charge cards online were basically traditional merchant account and payment gateway integration (terrible developer experience, excruciating long process, often borderline abusive conditions for merchants) or PayPal (terrible developer experience, faster experience for as long as it lasted, countless nightmare stories of frozen funds etc.).
Stripe came along and let you add that functionality within a few hours, and it did so while also providing excellent and highly developer-friendly documentation and support, which obviously plays very well to the typical HN reader. It wasn't about slightly higher fees vs. slightly lower fees, it was about whether it was possible and worth doing at all.
Stripe today is not as good as Stripe in the early days for many reasons, but it's still better than almost anyone else I've used on all of those scores. Presumably I'm not the only one on HN who has had that experience. It's reassuring that there are several more businesses now starting up in this area, but I haven't yet seen anyone significantly better that didn't also seem to have at least one significant drawback for any business I'm involved with that uses Stripe today.
When Stripe launched, the alternatives for a new or small business that wanted to charge cards online were basically traditional merchant account and payment gateway integration (terrible developer experience, excruciating long process, often borderline abusive conditions for merchants) or PayPal (terrible developer experience, faster experience for as long as it lasted, countless nightmare stories of frozen funds etc.).
Stripe came along and let you add that functionality within a few hours, and it did so while also providing excellent and highly developer-friendly documentation and support, which obviously plays very well to the typical HN reader. It wasn't about slightly higher fees vs. slightly lower fees, it was about whether it was possible and worth doing at all.
Stripe today is not as good as Stripe in the early days for many reasons, but it's still better than almost anyone else I've used on all of those scores. Presumably I'm not the only one on HN who has had that experience. It's reassuring that there are several more businesses now starting up in this area, but I haven't yet seen anyone significantly better that didn't also seem to have at least one significant drawback for any business I'm involved with that uses Stripe today.