> And, most of all, the author doesn't remember how nonobvious Stripe's utility was in its early days, even in the tech scene: there were established ways to take people's money and it wasn't clear why Stripe had an offering worth switching to.

I think you are misremembering. Stripe was a _big deal_. They had a curl call on their home page for a while for how to take a payment IIRC. It was like how Twilio opened the door for anyone to send SMS, Stripe made it stupid-easy to handle payments online. Nothing else at the time compared in terms of simplicity and clearly defined fees.