What if Stripe builds this

The "what if ${incumbent} builds this" question is usually asked as a meme. Really the only time it comes up is when founders make fun of crappy VCs. For some reason though, we hear this a lot. I think it's because:

1. People don't quite understand what we do. Which is fair enough. It's quite new and we're still not great at explaining it.

2. Stripe is still totally revered in the Startup ecosystem.

They've been around since 2009 and have had a complete monopoly over the early stage software market for over 16 years. There is no comparable company that can say the same:

• AWS (2006) -> Supabase

• Heroku (2007) -> Vercel or Render

• Twilio (2008) -> Resend

• Okta (2009) -> Clerk

• DataDog (2010) -> Sentry

The tech stack has tended to higher levels of abstraction over time. And while there has been competition targeting later-stage companies (eg for usage-billing, CPQ solutions), the early stage software market is still dominated by Stripe.

However, they've grown to a size where cracks are starting to show. They're less focused on the early stage segment (take a look at r/stripe if you're not convinced). And new devs struggle to set it up.

Because Autumn abstracts away all that complexity, people are starting to like what we do. If it continues to work, I'm sure Stripe will make a play here. However I still think we have a pretty good shot.

1. We'll always have a better product

From a high level it seems like we're a couple features on top of Stripe, and I will concede a fair amount of our current value is represented by that. But truly solving this problem is complex and will take years to get right.

Creating a platform that is simple to start with, but is flexible enough to run any pricing model is an infinite matrix of logic, scenarios, payment states, edge cases etc. This only gets harder and harder as we move upmarket.

Technically speaking it's a totally different challenge too: at scale we look more like a database (eg Supabase/Convex), or feature flagging system like LaunchDarkly. This is pretty far away from what Stripe is good at.

That's not to say that the best product always wins. But in devtools it certainly matters more than in other product categories.

2. Developers (and companies) like not being locked in

And there's 2 ways we play into that:

1. We're open source

2. We're not tied to Stripe. We can build our own system, and build integrations with Adyen, Chargebee, Checkout.com etc. This gives enterprises bargaining power with their payment providers.

So even if they decide to throw out Stripe and rebuild exactly what we're doing, we still have a pretty strong place in the market.

3. The market is very big

The market size for billing tools is around $10 billion and growing every year. Selling into a growing market is great because there are always new and interesting problems to focus on.

We're making a particular bet on early stage product-led companies, but every single company we've spoken to had their own unique problems. Whether in this space, earlier stage in the funnel during the sales process (CPQ), or later stage in the funnel (finance operations).

The timing feels right and I think what we're building is a good bet. That said Stripe if you wanna acquire us we'll still hear your offer 😙