But the easy-to-use API is 90% of the great product, isn't it? Because I noticed most other payment processors offer similar APIs now. PAY.ON develops a white-label platform for third-parties, so now my online bank offers me RESTful payment processing for Visa and Mastercard and I think they even support PayPal.

I haven't seen a single payments API made as clean or simple as Stripe's. The magic is in what you _can't_ do with it imo.

The solutions from old style banks adopting nicer looking APIs still force you to mess around with setting up your own acquiring bank account, etc.

Yes, you have to open a free business bank account (but most companies need one anyway) and then you apply for the payment processing. I should have added a link to the platform in my initial post. [1]

It might not be as easy to use as the Stripe API, but it offers you many more payment options. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this will put Stripe out of business, I'm just saying there seems to be a change in the payment processor landscape and in a few years, people might take these simple online payment platforms for granted.

[1] https://docs.aciworldwide.com/

Ease of use really matters. If you think of your product workflow being a series of micro solutions, then user delight implies you picked the right micro problems to build a solution for. For instagram, a key micro problem was it took too long to upload photos from a phone. They solved it by pre-uploading it. A great talk in this regard is 'Stanford to startup' by the instagram founder.

Before stripe came into the scene, I tried to do a paypal integration into an app once. It was an absolute nightmare. The one time I did stripe integration, my grandmother could have done it :)

Also, it doesn't matter that every bank builds an API once Stripe becomes (or is perceived as) a market leader. People view it as genuine and provide disproportionate value to the leader. People will go out of their way to use the market leading product even if they have to pay more. When you're in a store, think of how many times you buy the more expensive product because you see that as the default brand in that space.

But wasn't PayPal the market leader? Then how could Stripe have taken over? Well, PayPal sucked (for developers). Stripe was 10X better and took over while PayPal slept.

To replace the incumbent you need to be 5-10x better, otherwise nobody bothers to move over. The key to that is to pick the right set of micro problems to solve.

> For instagram, a key micro problem was it took too long to upload photos from a phone. They solved it by pre-uploading it.

Say what‽ Does Instagram just upload everything? Or do they start uploading a picture as one is editing the comments and such?

My understanding is once you have selected a photo, they upload it in the background while you're doing other things (like typing the caption). If you decide to cancel it, I believe (hope) they delete it from the server.

But it's the specific photo, not your whole album (that would be pointless ( and expensive) to do).

For instance, becoming the market leader worth $30B.