What did Stripe change (Value Add)?

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.

You'd have to physically visit the bank. If they didn't like how your face looks, that's it. They'd say no we're not going to let your company open a merchant account for card payments. Or if they didn't like your last name, your age or your sex.

Then all kinds of strange fees. Although if you were a physical location with a high transaction volume, then banks offer better rates than Stripe.

Then your actual commerce software. The best quality systems for online sales all work with Stripe, and not with your local banks offering. So if you want to forego Stripe, that also means you need to use a lower quality system. Meaning a worse experience for customers and for you and your staff.

1. PayPal, who wanted to own the customer relationship

2. A payment processor who all had awful APIs and you had to do lots of setup around having a merchant account. Authorize.net I think was one of these

3. An intermediary processor, who didn't need you to have a merchant account, nochex, Worldpay, sagepay, etc. who again generally all had awful APIs and hard to embed widgets and complicated setup processes

Stripe solved all these pain points, and the API was great.

You controlled the customer relationship, it was easy to embed the stripe widget, it had a great API, you didn't need a merchant account and the setup was quick and easy.

And then they brought out a little widget you could attach to your phone/tablet to allow easy in-person card payments!

So they solved lots of pain points at once.

It probably seems a bit incomprehensible now, but this was a time when everyone did everything slightly awkwardly. For examples the APIs. Great APIs were rare, as far as I remember twilio really blazed the way there. Companies like Google were putting out absolute dogshit, complicated APIs, often strict REST with weird header requirements, or strange signing with private keys. If you've never dealt with it, strict REST really, really sucks.