Stripe’s new funding round values company at $35B

As others have said, the documentation is the major issue. PI takes time to understand, particularly if used to the old way. The documentation is improving but still a mess. Code examples miss steps, and I only made progress when I found this page: https://stripe.com/docs/payments/payment-intents/web-manual which 2 weeks ago wasn't clearly linked in the documentation (and https://stripe.com/docs/payments/payment-intents/migration where I kept ending up had contradictory code for the last stages). The split between automatic and manual confirmation isn't helpful.

Like others, each integration took longer than the 1 day I expected. I resorted to reading the API documentation at times to work out which JS method I needed - something I don't normally need with Stripe! handleCardPayment() vs handleCardAction() vs createPaymentMethod()... there's so many code snippets floating around in the docs for contradictory flows.

If Stripe really want to improve matters, a "What do you want to do?" wizard that asks questions like "When do you want to confirm?" and "Do you need to store the card?" and produces the right code snippets at the end would be helpful.

I also feel Stripe has dropped the ball in Europe. I was consulting with a client with not-insignificant turnover, and I recommended they switch to Stripe. The sales team took a week to reply to his enquiry, then didn't answer the questions but returned a boilerplate response. And this went on. It's not a good impression and made me look bad. I'm going to be less open to recommending Stripe to existing, established businesses now.

4-6 years ago Stripe was a shining example of a motivated sales and support team. Now - old and painful-to-integrate competitors like SagePay are doing better. Or shudder Braintree, who have arrived with discounted rates, terrible documentation, but an easy-to-drop-in JS widget for all payment methods.

You could have a test account in less than an hour, and be ready to process real transactions in less than a week.

Stripe has plenty of competition, most of which have been around longer. You could argue that Stripe have a better API and that certainly has value.

By the time it gets to our implementation it's horrible and occasionally (2% of the time?) we get a payment attempt that the client has handled and submitted to our server but isn't in succeeded state. We temporarily fix this by redirecting them back to the payment page but this time in 'Charges' mode. Which seems to work about 50% of the time I wonder how much of this complexity is necessary - inevitable given SCA - and how much is because of Stripe's desire to support DD / bank-based payment methods in one integration. I guess we will see if, once SCA becomes widespread, other payment processors have simpler integrations...

Speaking of SCA, I really don't understand the motivation - it's not like higher fraud rates were hurting consumers, since those costs were borne by the merchants. My suspicion is that it is in the interest of card-alternatives like Sofort to add some friction to card payments, after all if every customer has to visit their bank for authentication anyway, why bother with a card payment at all?

That said, it is infuriating that after wasting all that time re-developing, SCA doesn't seem to have gone live at all. It reminds me of GDPR - the law abiding god-fearing types spend weeks worrying about compliance, disrupting their business; whereas the cowboys just take no notice - and get away with it.

It seems to be how the EU rolls: sweeping changes with terrifying penalties and sudden deadlines followed by minimal or selective enforcement.

I completely agree - I consider Stripe the gold standard for an API. Best I've ever used.

So yes, it is available on the home page - it's the most important thing there!