Stripe: The AWS of Money

Let’s start out with the TL;DR: Stripe makes it really easy for businesses to accept payments online. It monetizes by taking a small cut of each transaction, and there’s some added premium tools its customers can take advantage of.

Even shorter? Stripe wants to be the AWS of money. And they might just pull it off.

The longer version? Well, you have to read on!

Stripe: The Story So Far

You probably live in a house, or an apartment, and you’ve got things within your walls that “just work.” Things like plumbing. Unless you’ve taken an interest, you likely have no idea how your plumbing operates, but it delivers water where you need it, and takes... things away when you flush them.

Think of Stripe as a digital plumber. As you roam around the internet buying things and subscribing to others you’re dealing with the payments plumbing that Stripe helps enable. The work isn’t quite as dirty, but it’s still largely behind the walls, and Stripe does a fantastic job at giving you little need to tear down the sheet rock.

Let’s skip the plumbing allegories though and get on down to the nitty gritty of what Stripe does and how it makes money.

So... What is Stripe, Really?

Stripe started as a simple promise: make accepting payments online as easy as copy-pasting a few lines of code.

While that idea hardly seems revolutionary today, it completely changed the game for online businesses.

Before Stripe, setting up online payments was akin to doing your own dental work. You had to deal with banks, merchant accounts, gateways, PCI compliance, and yeah... it was a mess.

Stripe cleaned all of that up and today it powers millions of businesses. OpenAI, Amazon, Google, Anthropic, Shopify, Airbnb, and so many more trust stripe to handle their payments.

And, while I said we’d stay away from plumbing, it turns out I lied. Plumbing is an excellent metaphor to talk about Stripe’s path with. See, it started with fixing the pipes (payments), but it has evolved into being able to install entire water systems (banking infrastructure) behind the walls of modern software.

I can’t tie the metaphor to all the parts in the middle, so I’ll stick to a nice bulleted list for that. Today, Stripe handles things like:

• Payments (duh!)
  • Subscriptions, one time, invoicing
• Fraud prevention
• Tax compliance, point of sale, and global expansion
• Incorporation, tax forms, all that fun stuff with Atlas
• Embedded finance: bank accounts, cards, and loans

The goal? Let any company, tech-savvy or not, plug into modern financial tools and build like a fintech.

How Does Stripe Make Money?

Payments are still the bread & butter of this company, and that’s where Stripe makes the bulk of its money today. A typical payment is usually:

2.9% + 30¢ per transaction.

(Pricing varies by country and payment method, but 2.9% + 30¢ is the standard for U.S. card payments)

This rate is inclusive of everything a transaction needs to happen. It has the Visa / Mastercard fees baked in along with any issuing bank fees, and Stripe’s margin.

This type of pricing, and the accessibility of Stripe are amazing for a small business or indie dev. You know exactly what you’re going to pay without having to haggle or deal with any hidden complexity. Stripe keeps things simple, and makes billions in revenue along the way.

But, as mentioned above, Stripe is heading towards much more than just payments. There’s layers to the game.

Stripe’s Layers

The easiest way to work through the wonder of Stripe’s offerings is to pretend we’re building a startup. So, let’s build WindowSprint (get it? Like DoorDash :) ).

The Core

We’re building WindowSprint! It’s a great new product that allows users to pick out items and we’ll get them from the store and deliver today! There’s that chicken and egg problem of scaling, but we’re going to start small and I’ll handle the deliveries myself in my town.

Great! First thing I’ll need is a way to accept payments. A user can add a bar of soap and pay in the app.

We’ll be charged per transaction, the aforementioned 2.9% + 30¢, so we’ll want to make sure that’s baked into the cost of doing business.

Because of the ease of adding payments with Stripe, we’re able to get payment functionality added and go live with an MVP this week!

The Platform Layer

Business is booming! WindowSprint is the hottest startup in town and we need to make this a legitimate business before things get out of control.

You first create an LLC with Stripe Atlas (a $500 one-time fee).

You also think it’s worth making sure there’s nothing fraudulent happening within your app, after all those chargebacks are pricey, so you add screening with Radar at roughly 5¢ per transaction.

You see the benefit of “Buy Now Pay Later.” Stripe helps you get setup with Klarna who will charge 5.99% + 30¢, with Stripe keeping some portion of that.

And, finally, for now at least, you realize that some older customers like placing phone orders so you decide to get setup with Stripe Terminal. The card reader is $59, and you get charged 2.7% + 5¢ per transaction there.

Phew, this is becoming a lot. It’s the price of doing business though. And at least it’s all in one place. Building all this with tools pre-Stripe would have taken a team. As it stands, nothing we’ve created so far would require more than a solo dev.

Embedded Finance

If it was booming before, it has gone stratospheric now. You see a need to add more WindowShoppers to your business and you want to make sure they don’t have to dip into their own bank accounts to make purchases.

Luckily, Stripe has a solution: embedded finance.

You get started by issuing custom debit cards to your workers, these cards can be topped up with the right amount to WindowShop with so you’re not subject to fraud from your team. Each physical card is $3.50, and you earn a share of the interchange revenue!

From here, you can start to get really fancy, but Stripe doesn’t publish pricing beyond card issuance. Maybe one day we’ll get a look at those docs, or can compare with pricing from businesses like SoFi’s Galileo.

The Bigger Play

Stripe started with payments. Then it layered on tools. Now, it's quietly becoming something much bigger: the financial operating system for the internet.

It wants to be the AWS of money. The backend nobody sees, but that everybody depends on.

Most companies just solve a single part of the money movement puzzle. Stripe wants to solve the whole thing and offer it as a clean set of APIs you never have to think too hard about.

Every layer adds:

• Stickiness: Once you build on Stripe, switching is painful.
• Revenue diversity: Payments fund the platform, but tools like Atlas, Radar, and Issuing drive margins.
• Distribution: Stripe is already everywhere. Embedded finance makes it even more entrenched.

This isn’t just a fintech company. It’s an infrastructure company that happens to make money move.

Why This Matters

Stripe is still private, but when it goes public, it won’t be judged solely on payment volume. Investors will be watching:

• How well it moves upmarket
• How sticky its platform becomes
• How much of the financial stack it can swallow

And for product people? It’s a reminder of how valuable it is to start simple, solve real pain, and then layer strategically until you own the backend of an entire category.