I just want to take payments for dead-simple SaaS. I don't care about the 20,000 use cases for different billing product lifecycles, itemizations, etc.
"Launching a startup? Do this: [x]" would be incredible.
It's wild that Stripe doesn't have the 99% case covered.
The real reason for this is probably because Stripe's main customer isn't the scrappy upstart anymore, but rather the giants up-market. We're table scraps now.
You'd be paying for the prepackaged all hosted and standardized offering (at the higher price point) if all you wanted was to "just" take payments.
I assume you actually want recurring payments, potentially lower fees and a personalized checkout experience ?
Welcome anyway, I've been playing with payments systems for a long time and there's no shortage of fun and new regulatory spice coming in every now and then. "Just" taking payments can be a whole way of life.
The API surface area is large and cluttered with stuff that's entirely irrelevant to most business types, yet you have to understand which parts of the API, checkout session, and webhook callback payloads are relevant and mutate your subscription state.
If you're not letting them do the checkout from start to end with only theme changes to the hosted payment page, you're signing up yourself to learn the different flavours of payment auth, callbacks and state management.