[andygcook]

Sorry for missing this thread. Stripe's mission is to "increase the GDP of the internet." It's the main headline on their About Us page. https://stripe.com/about

I take it to mean that by making setting up payments infrastructure easier for developers, more projects actually get started. Not to promote too much, but my brother's side project, NanaGram.co, would probably not exist without Stripe.

We actually used a pre-Stripe legacy payments gateway for our first startup (Rentabilities, now dead) and it was painful. I doubt he would have gone through that pain again to setup payments without Stripe. Yes, there are other providers that are good enough now like Braintree, etc, but I'd argue that Stripe forced the industry by raising the bar for developer UX.