Is Stripe the biggest product trap of the 21st century? Let’s say you need to get paid, or you just made $100. Stripe is already there. Docs, checkout, webhooks. Naturally you flip it on. The page says 2.9% + 30¢. Sounds fine. So that’s the $100. Then the receipt starts talking: - 2.9% + 30¢ → $96.80 - international card +1.5% → $95.30 - USD in, EUR out, conversion ~1% → $94.30 - Adaptive pricing: customer sees a local price with a 2–4% markup, you still pay processing - Managed Payments +3.5% → $90.80 - Billing extra if it’s a sub, 0.7% → $90.10 - Tax: 0.5% → $89.60 You thought you made $100. You’re holding about $90 and that’s the good version, nobody disputed yet. Then the dashboard isn’t a payments screen. it’s a (low quality) store: - Radar Lite “included” (wtf even is this) - Radar Standard $10–20/mo, or cents per screened payment, for the real AI fraud thing - Smart Disputes auto-fights and takes 30% if it wins - you want one number the reports don’t have → Sigma, $15/mo - Data Pipeline $65/mo to dump it into Snowflake - Signals, Identity, Atlas, Climate, Capital, Issuing, Treasury I opened it to check a payout and spent ten minutes in tabs I never turned on. Then the customer disputes. “Product unacceptable.” You delivered, but it doesn’t matter. - bank files - they take the $100 back - $15 / €20 dispute fee the same day, win or lose - you already paid $10 in processing. they keep that - fight and lose → another $15 / €20 Same $100 sale, worst path: $100 − $10 in stacked fees − $100 clawback − $15 dispute − $15 for fighting What’s left of the $100: about −$40 Negative balance, if that payment was most of what you had. Small ticket or big ticket, it's the same mechanic. Bank can take three months. A friend told me this years ago. I only got it on the ledger: don’t ever run a large payment through Stripe. Why you still use it: - PayPal does the same thing, uglier, and freezes you - Adyen is cheaper at volume and takes weeks of sales - Square is a till - Mollie is fine if you’re small and EU - Paddle / Polar take ~5% to wear the tax - Lemon Squeezy is Stripe now - Visa/MC wrote the chargeback rules for all of them So you stay. You bake 8-12% into the price. You treat a card like it might come back as a debt. Big invoices go on a transfer. A market this size should have five serious options you can switch to asap