Yes, Stripe's product is literally playing the middleman, but there are a lot of contexts where a middleman is nevertheless a net positive. That said, are your

Yes, Stripe's product is literally playing the middleman, but there are a lot of contexts where a middleman is nevertheless a net positive. That said, are your numbers for just the network fees or do they include interchange fees as well? In any case, I remember the sort of hoops I had to jump through back around 2007 to setup a gateway through Authorize.net and a merchant account for a very small service (annual transactions around 150-200k). Every step of the process, from setting up the accounts to dealing with their API was a nightmare, and recurring billing threw some additional hurdles in for fun if I'm remembering correctly. Beyond that, there are a lot of ways to screw up with billing and payment processing. In my experience, Stripe's generally competitive and easy to deal with. That's not to say that they make sense for all scenarios. They don't. But if you're a startup looking to make it to launch, there's a strong argument for keeping the billing side of things as straightforward as possible.