Stripe

Stripe is payments infrastructure. Card processing, subscriptions and billing, invoicing, marketplace payouts, fraud prevention, and tax calculation, behind an API that set the standard other payment companies are still measured against.

We use it wherever money moves. The reason is rarely the pricing — it's that the hard parts are handled: card storage compliance, 3D Secure, dunning when a renewal fails, and the tax rules that differ in every country you sell into. Those are all things you can build badly yourself for months.

Very few teams beat Stripe on developer experience, but the alternatives matter in specific cases. Paddle and Lemon Squeezy act as merchant of record, meaning they take on sales tax and VAT liability entirely — worth real money if you sell software internationally and don't want to register in a dozen jurisdictions. Adyen and Braintree compete at enterprise volume where a fraction of a percent is a serious number. Polar is the newer, developer-focused option for digital products. For most teams the honest advice is to start on Stripe and only move when a specific constraint — tax exposure, volume pricing, or a market Stripe doesn't serve — makes the migration pay for itself.