[gzer0]

Stripe has been receiving a suspicious amount of praise from HN. Really beginning to wonder if this is all organic at this point. Obviously lots of employees in the comments which they are not hiding that fact. But still makes me want to dig deeper than the surface (as everyone should).

[poxrud]

If you've ever had to setup an ecommerce site before Stripe was around you'd understand why they get so much praise. Your only options were either navigating the complex and expensive world of merchant accounts or dealing with PayPal's horrible API and customer service.

[Silhouette]

Stripe almost always receives a lot of praise from HN. That makes perfect sense: it's a YC success story, but more than that, it's a service many of us can relate to, it's a service many of us use or have used ourselves, and probably quite a few of us have been here from its early days and watched it grow.

That doesn't mean the near-universal praise is always justified, of course. The Stripe of today is to some extent a victim of its own success, and the clean API, excellent documentation and first rate customer service that it was famous for in its early days are all sadly shadows of their former selves today.

That in turn doesn't mean Stripe is bad relative to its competitors, of course. It's just not as good as it used to be.

[15155]

Depending on how old you are: Stripe occupies a market segment that was previously _extremely_ difficult to access.

Authorize.net, merchant acquiring banks, etc. - all of this was _horrible_ for a small, fledgling company.