Your experience runs completely opposite mine integrating ecommerce solutions for large companies. The amount of complexity and headaches it takes to develop with PayPal vs Stripe is orders of magnitude higher. For instance, recurring plans with discount tiers is trivial to manage with Stripe, but a 10x complexity and cost basis higher with PayPal. Those engineers and technical debt is a lot higher than the cost savings, where you'll probably get a better deal from Cybersource or Authorize.net by a large margin (1.6% fees on my last project).
I have developed an application that uses Paypal's subscription plan API's. I just looked up the invoice that I sent to that client I did work for: 20 hours of work, including custom integration into their word press platform.
Are you suggesting that if Stripe were available at the time, this work would have been reduced to 2 hours?
I'm not you, and I don't know what you did, but the Stripe integrations I've done (which were very complex and touched on lots of functionality) took (much?) less than two hours, so probably yes.
"Your experience runs completely opposite mine integrating ecommerce solutions for large companies. "
My prototype was just that - a prototype - it took all of about 3 hours to put together, and throwing a paypal form on it was, as I said, about 2 minutes. I said nothing about "integrating ecommerce solutions for large companies".
