well first off they have many customers, I'm one of them, that use and love their product.
Second, anyone with an established merchant account that would like to add a recurring payments front to it is in the market for recurly and not as much stripe.
Not sure about Samurai, but Stripe is an aggregator of payments which can lead to problems down the line because credit card companies don't like to deal with aggregators because when issues arise with customers, the onus is on the credit card companies.
Example: a Amex customer tells amex 'I never paid company X money'. Amex looks and doesn't see any payment to company X but a payment from Stripe which aggregated payments from Company X. This creates problems which typically yield in Amex refunding the customer but taking the hit because they can't prove it to the aggregator. It makes it very hard to resolve the issue and as a result credit card companies start playing hard ball with aggregators. Note: I'm a huge fan of Stripe and what they're doing. All the power to them.
Recurring billing is a whole separate issue. I've rolled my own before and realized how much of a pain it can become. Using recurly allows all non devs on my team to handle all the subscription and recurring problems without me having to build anything.
Second, anyone with an established merchant account that would like to add a recurring payments front to it is in the market for recurly and not as much stripe.
Not sure about Samurai, but Stripe is an aggregator of payments which can lead to problems down the line because credit card companies don't like to deal with aggregators because when issues arise with customers, the onus is on the credit card companies. Example: a Amex customer tells amex 'I never paid company X money'. Amex looks and doesn't see any payment to company X but a payment from Stripe which aggregated payments from Company X. This creates problems which typically yield in Amex refunding the customer but taking the hit because they can't prove it to the aggregator. It makes it very hard to resolve the issue and as a result credit card companies start playing hard ball with aggregators. Note: I'm a huge fan of Stripe and what they're doing. All the power to them.