Before Stripe, setting up a merchant processor account was a major pain for everyone involved from management wanting a simple UI/UX to developers wanting ease of implementation.<p>Fast forward until today, now this is the bar and merchant processing is a commodity. In a commodity, the lowest price wins. Stripe isn't the lowest price.<p>We just for instance switched to Helcim, a similar UI/UX to Stripe and we are saving 0.05% a year. On top of this, many new entrants have come in to serve certain audiences better (E.g. Square for Retail, Ayden for Enterprise)<p>Hence, Stripe's days are numbered as they don't have lock-in either and really have no moat.
"Better payment solutions for businesses in North America."<p>They aren't international yet, so I'd say Stripe is still alive and thriving.