Apparently Buffet calls this a “toll booth” business.
Once the road is built (customer integrates Stripe into their state machine), you can just keep collecting their toll for driving on the Stripe highway.
The thing is, if you didn't integrate Stripe, you'd either be:
1. integrating someone else who does roughly the same thing as Stripe
2. integrating with and maintaining 100's of individual payment methods and countries, and dealing with tons of entities and managing relationships with them.
You might be able to cheat if you just do visa cards and only in the US, or something. But that is dramatically less than what you're getting when you integrate Stripe.
Middlemen all the way down. At this point I think the question is when does the fatigue start? Maybe it never does -- if 10 companies all take 0.5%, you're at 5% but what if you use them to run 90% of the work of running your actual business? For many businesses that would be worth it (and most SaaS-ers and proper business people would heartily agree).
I'm about to go off on a wild tangent here but I think this is the obvious endgame for autonomous vehicles (article from Ars Technical on this hit HN just today[0]). More narrative for that world where no one owns anything and everyone rents forever and if you didn't own capital by 2100 your chance to do so is now infinitesimal. Safety of autonomous cars will surpass human driving, human driving will be outlawed, and the toll booth behavior will kick in with either companies licensing self driving technology, or the cars, or just running the services. Yeah, you never pay the $1-2k to buy a beat up first car (that could have lasted you 5 years with careful care and proper maintenance), but you're stuck on the $8.50/day ($2040/year if you commute to work 240 days/year), forever.
Another wilder tangent (possibly too much of a distraction from the topic at hand) -- this future is one of the reasons I am skeptical of UBI. UBI feels like the fastest way to encourage every kind of company to take this route. If you know every citizen will get $1k/month, the monopoly-dominated markets will fight (initially, at least) to get their share of that guaranteed $1k, almost as a form of governmental graft. Differentiated work pools get rarer and rarer (people specialize up, but automation gets better, ad infinitum), and at some point a large mass of people are getting UBI + gig economy wages. The corporations who have carved their part of the daily budget out never stop winning -- they now don't need to worry about economic conditions for their now-somewhat-more-distant gig worker force, the government will step in to help citizens, and those corporations can continue to influence those proceedings. What breaks this cycle? Is the goal a utopian world where $UBI is actually enough to free people of work completely? That never seems to be the goal, or maybe I just haven't seen enough people play out enough steps in the UBI plan. I just know that when people doing really well in the current capitalism-on-overdrive system start to get behind something that really seems like a utopia for those doing not-so-well in the current system, there's a catch.
Once the road is built (customer integrates Stripe into their state machine), you can just keep collecting their toll for driving on the Stripe highway.