Once upon a time, it was like a breath of fresh air. Originally pitched as a dev-first payment API, it was vastly easier to get up and running than other options at the time. In recent years it has suffered under the weight of its own success. The simplicity and ease of use it once promised has been buried beneath a now-bloated and obtuse API. The user interface has struggled to keep up with the feature creep and it too has become a challenge to navigate and interact with. The documentation, once considered an industry-leading example of how to write and present such things, has mutated into a frustrating byzantine mess that's riddled with contradictions and obvious omissions.

As an early adopter and someone that was once very fond of this company and its approach to things, I'm disappointed to see the direction it has gone.

Is it that bad? Is anyone doing it right?

From a development perspective, Stripe is by far the fastest/easiest to integrate with, the most featureful, and has the best documentation. As I understand it, other payment providers will often require underwriting up front before you can even begin, which can take a while.

One reason might be that the founders and some key employees are active on hn. Also, they have services like Atlas that may help the typical HN crowd.

It's following the trend of nearly every startup ever made.

* Newcomer trying to gain traction. They'll do just about anything to make and keep customers in the name of top-line growth. This includes expensive labor and human costs.

* Grow into a successful business. Start feeling the pains of "infinite growth".

* Realizing revenue can't grow indefinitely, they start cutting costs and see how long they can ride the coat-tails of success.

* The small/cheap accounts start gaining wind that customer support sucks, so they start looking for something else. The big accounts are likely still happy since they're large enough to justify a handler who will make them happy.

* A new startup lurks in the background, likely to follow the same process.

It really just comes down to whether or not the incumbent realizes it's only a matter of time before the major accounts start leaving too.

Where I am from, Stripe and PayPal seem to be two of the bigger options, apart from regional providers (e.g. provided by banks).

From what I can tell, Stripe's documentation is generally regarded as nice, just have a look at some of the examples: https://stripe.com/docs

That said, PayPal also seems to be okay, for the most part: https://developer.paypal.com/home

Edit: is it just me, or does PayPal's UI kind of break, when you choose the "horizontal" layout in their integration builder? Example: https://imgur.com/a/IvBdYeI

Both of them seem to have some scary stories around them, in regards to frozen funds or closed accounts, but what are you going to do about that? For many, there aren't many options, since any of the other platforms out there are likely to have similar power over your finances if you go with them.

The Stripe backend and API documentation is incredible with the amount of data and logs they provide. Never seen any service that got it so right.

It does have its quirks, like searching for a stripe customer id won't give you what you're looking for but searching for the amount will.

Mollie on the other hand has like 2 pages where you can see your transactions.

Strips isn't perfect but they're absolutely the best.

And they do have customer support if you really need it.

Stripe is a ycombinator company