I'm not sure I like this idea. Braintree is a legit competitor to Stripe. I'm guessing they have some informal agreement to keep transaction fees about the same but if they become 1 company, what's to stop Stripe from raising fees even more?

I'm not a fan of either to be honest, PayPal once told me I was wrong with something related to taxes and a bunch of different reps told me what I was saying and reported was impossible. Their tax division specialists also replied by email with big bold red letters outlining how it's not possible and that I'm wrong multiple times. They were contacted through support cases I opened with other reps on the phone since they aren't directly accessible on phone.

Then I said I was canceling my account with them if this wasn't resolved since it would have resulted in me needing to pay $400 to have my taxes amended. Long story short, after being ghosted for 3 months they replied to me saying I was right and they indeed had the impossible problem, then fixed their tax forms a week before taxes were due.

It's really bad that a random person on the internet discovered a huge issue with one of their partners and their instinct was to require ~10 hours of back and forth phone calls, multiple emails, me giving them the likely problem and solution on day 1 only to be lead on and ignored for months until the very last second.

▲

benmorris an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Braintree was a legit competitor, last time I checked they won't even onboard you if you don't have an established business grossing over 100k/yr.

▲

dfunckt an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The dystopia that PayPal is we’re cheering and paying trillionaires to bring forward faster. Can’t wait.

▲

novia an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Paypal offshored all of their support staff.

	▲	geden 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		They've been abysmal and borderline criminal since the start. They randomly withheld £20k from a business I was involved with for no stated reason and no direct means to talk to a human about it. It took months to resolve. And as for their actual website...

▲

gigatexal an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But there are many competitors no? Adyen at least comes to mind.

▲

paytonjjones an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> informal agreement to keep transaction fees about the same

This would be like, ridiculously illegal. It's also not practical; if you can steal customers, the incentive to undercut is very strong.

▲

yawniek 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> This would be like, ridiculously illegal. It's also not practical;

Not if you pay a bit of dividends to jared or dtj

▲

bdcravens 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Of course, but that's the thing about "informal" agreements: presumably there's no record of it. Price collusion happens way more than most realize. I was at a trade show for my employer when a competitor walked up to our booth and out loud proposed that we should all fix our prices. We didn't of course, but the brazenness of saying something like that out in the open like was what surprised me.

▲

stavros 19 minutes ago | parent [-]

The good thing about price collusion is that it's hard to coordinate. If even one competitor defects (and they have every advantage to, as they'll win big), then the cartel falls apart.

▲

tough 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

sounds like an org prisonner's dilemma

	▲	stavros 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly.

▲

PunchyHamster 10 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

That assumes that

* it instantly brings them a ton of consumers * they have capacity to serve those customers

if they don't competitor can just keep higher price (especially if it is just small middleman fee most people might not care that much about)

And even if both of those are true worst possible case is them expanding to handle influx of customers and then competition following in few months, making their investment moot