You can make a very good business of consulting people off of Stripe. Developers do love it, and for good reason (as the article points out). But it is expensive. If you are running $1,000,000 in credit card transactions per year at $29 each you will pay almost $40,000 in fees. Get up to $10,000,000 in transactions and you are now at $400,000 (this is basic pricing without volume discount, but they are still more expensive than most other interchanges). Suddenly it makes sense to look at other credit card processing technologies. There are a lot of costs to processing credit cards. But, if you have a CFO at your startup, they'll definitely run the numbers.

I think "Get the kids to take up smoking strategy" is a fairly accurate description of their Atlas program https://stripe.com/atlas

And their slogan "Our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet" https://stripe.com/about also alludes to the strategy of helping actually create more online businesses, as opposed to just getting all online businesses to use Stripe.

I think a lot of the big valuation is based on hoping the former is true. Stripe has a few big customers, and some of them are companies like Instacart that are younger than Stripe and have been on the platform since the beginning