[haploid]

I can't speak to Braintree because we don't use them. I do believe that they will set up a merchant account for you as a proxy or agent, IIRC.

But I can speak to the economics of all this "complexity" of which you speak.

We currently use CyberSource for our gateway and associated banks for our Merchant Accounts, and we maintain several accounts. Each account takes less than a day to set up, with our representatives at each company.

Integrating with the CyberSource API takes roughly 20 developer-hours.

An increase in transaction costs to 5%+0.30, would cost us roughly the salary+benefits+taxes+overhead of two fulltime developers, per year. That's a cost that's simply unacceptable.

There is also the issue of "killing the need for a merchant account", being problematic from a number of legal/accounting angles( tracing this transaction from A to M, entity separation and identifcation ), as well as customer service angles( what is this PAYCSTRIPE_TCMERCH charge on my card?? ).

[Scramblejams]

You've got what's called a nice problem to have. At that rate you must be charging many millions per year, so sure, it's all about minimizing your fees. But for those of us with much smaller-to-nonexistent revenues, wondering whether our app will even make money at all, Stripe makes all kinds of sense and is a prefect place to start.