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Re:Ask HN: What did Stripe change (Value Add)? by tobinfekkes on Tuesday November 25, 2025 @01:13PM (#46048772)
Pro: they abstracted away the intricacies of getting "KYC" approval to take payments and abstracted the merchant services integration, so a developer could be up and taking payments in hours, rather than weeks/months.

Con: they abstracted the relationship a merchant has with their processor, so now they stand between you and your money, they decide whether you get it or not, or if you're banned or not, and you have no recourse if they decide your story isn't compelling enough.

Re:Ask HN: What did Stripe change (Value Add)? by factorialboy on Tuesday November 25, 2025 @04:36PM (#46051089)
To add to this, one of their biggest pros was the developer documentation.

The quality of documentation that Stripe had stood out not only in the payment processing space, but in the industry as a whole.

Re:Ask HN: What did Stripe change (Value Add)? by tobinfekkes on Tuesday November 25, 2025 @07:04PM (#46052440)
Completely agree, thank you for adding that. Their documentation was a head above the rest; personalizing the example API calls with your key/token included within the documentation made it trivial to try it out and see something working almost immediately.