Although I agree with all the issues you raise, I think the confusing nature of the pricing is by design.
Stripe's fee model probably makes serious bank, because it's quite non-transparent and basically nothing is provided for free. Want even the slightest extra feature? +1% of your revenue (and repeat)
It's worth noting that most customers with any volume will be on custom contracts that will either be cheaper, include more features, or both. At my previous workplace we had this with relatively modest revenue and would renegotiate every year or two.
- Have a large enough transaction volume, say, above $100k / mo.
- Use the contact form.
Note that if your transaction volume is $100k/mo, and Stripe takes 3% of it, it's $3k/mo for them. Maybe a customer that's worth paying extra attention to, but of course by spending a minimal amount of time.
I suspect that if your transaction volume were, say, $1M/mo, they would have contacted you already.
Stripe is also one of the most expensive payment services - enough so that I worked at a company where we had an in-house payments frontend for Asia which was basically a common integration over about 6 different major regional banks. The reason was pretty obvious: Stripe was something like a 2.5% surcharge, our system 0.2-0.5%. That was a huge difference in revenue.
How did you get the visa and mastercard interchange fees down so low? Just the interchange fees for non debit cards can be as high as 2.5% (premium travel cards for example), not even mentioning Stripe's fee then.
Stripe ['s leadership] doesn't want to IPO, and its balance sheet doesn't need to. There's ridiculous demand for a Stripe IPO, whether it could is not at all in question.
An IPO is, if anything, a bad thing for a company. I wouldn't consider it a black mark that they aren't selling stock publicly and subjecting themselves to the "must grow every quarter at all costs" insanity.
I’d say it’s not enough to satisfy early investors, who probably want a 10~50x return before IPO. They could definitely go public if they wanted to, and do ‘well’.
Stripe's fee model probably makes serious bank, because it's quite non-transparent and basically nothing is provided for free. Want even the slightest extra feature? +1% of your revenue (and repeat)