Stripe is more complex than it needs to be. The product surface area has exploded, Payments, Billing, Connect, Checkout, Payment Links, Elements, Tax, Radar, Terminal, Issuing, and figuring out which combination of products you actually need for a basic use case is harder than it should be.
The dashboard reflects this: powerful, but you're hunting through nested menus to find settings that should be one click away. Setup for anything beyond a single one-off charge involves piecing together multiple docs pages, and the difference between (e.g.) Checkout vs Elements vs Payment Intents isn't obvious until you've already picked wrong once. It works.
I'm not switching, but a "I'm a solo dev, I just want to take recurring payments, give me the minimum viable path" mode would save a lot of people a lot of time.
Stripe
There is something about this Launch that isn't right ?
This launch has Stripe this, Stripe that, Stripe Here, Stripe there, Stripe everywhere.
Click on the "visit" link (above):
You don't get taken to a product page..
You don't get taken to a Stripe landing page..
You get taken directly to a payment portal for
KIMI EZ SALES
with no connection to Stripe, other than stripe processes the payments.
There is NOTHING on this payment portal to suggest you are purchasing a "Stripe" product or service..
Moving on to Stripe's app marketplace, products page, news pages etc, this "social media pack", launched today by Stripe (according to this listing) gets NO mention anywhere !
I have come to my own opinion on this - - I would sincerely love to be wrong
Stripe is kind of the gold standard already, honestly. One thing that would be really useful is a built-in subscription dunning tool that automatically retries failed payments with smarter retry timing based on the customer's history, instead of having to set up that whole logic yourself. Right now I usually end up building a custom workaround for it. Would save a lot of dev time and probably recover more revenue for people using the platform.
How does it help content creators? Need to know more !
Honestly the docs site might be the best in the industry. Everything from the code samples to the API reference just feels really thoughtfully put together, you know.