Stripe
Takes payments online for you, with AI-driven fraud screening and an assistant that answers plain-English questions about your revenue.
What it costs
| Tier | Price | For | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Card payments (domestic) | 3% + RM1.00 per successful transaction, plus 1% for international cards and a further 2% if currency conversion is required (Malaysia pricing; USD figure not confirmed — see knownIssues) | Most online businesses accepting card payments. | Card acceptance, the Stripe Dashboard, and basic reporting. |
| Local payment methods | 3% + RM1.00 for FPX; 2.9% + RM1.00 for Alipay; 3% for GrabPay (Malaysia pricing) | Businesses in markets where bank transfer or wallet payments outsell cards. | Support for the region's common non-card payment methods alongside cards. |
| In-person (Terminal) | 2.8% + RM0.50 per domestic charge, plus 1% for international cards (Malaysia pricing) | Businesses taking payments face to face. | Card-reader hardware support and the same dashboard and reporting as online payments. |
| Radar (AI fraud screening) | From RM0.23 per screened transaction | Anyone wanting a machine-learning fraud layer on top of standard processing. | Fraud scoring trained across Stripe's network of businesses, applied to every transaction. |
| Smart Disputes | 30% of the disputed amount, charged only on disputes you win | Businesses that want dispute evidence prepared automatically rather than by hand. | AI-assembled evidence submission for chargeback disputes. |
Read from Stripe's own pricing page on 25 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.
Where it breaks
This machine resolves to Malaysia, and stripe.com/pricing geo-served Ringgit rates with a Malaysia-specific payment-method lineup (FPX, GrabPay) rather than whatever a US or other-region account would see. Percentage-based fees are broadly consistent across Stripe's regions, but the flat per-transaction amount and the available local payment methods are not — check stripe.com/pricing from your own region for the figure that applies to you.
API-first; almost every integration runs through code or a no-code connector like [Make](/tools/make/) rather than a Stripe-hosted storefront.
First entry in this reference. There is no previous check to compare it against.
Stripe is infrastructure more than it is a product you interact with directly — a business rarely “uses” Stripe the way it uses Xero or Squarespace; it integrates Stripe once, and payments flow through it afterward without anyone opening a Stripe tab for each transaction. Every successful payment is a trigger firing without you present, screened for fraud and processed the same way at 3am as at 3pm.
The AI shows up in two places worth knowing about specifically. Radar scores every transaction for fraud risk using a model trained across Stripe’s entire network of merchants, not just your own transaction history — a meaningful advantage for a small business that would otherwise have too little data of its own to train anything useful. Smart Disputes goes further, assembling the evidence packet for a chargeback dispute automatically, which is normally the most tedious part of fighting one.
The fee structure that matters most
The headline percentage fee is the number most businesses fixate on, but the flat per-transaction charge and the available local payment methods vary meaningfully by region — what showed on this check was Malaysia’s card, FPX and GrabPay pricing, not a US business’s card and ACH rates. Read the fee schedule from the region you actually operate in before modelling margins.
Where it fits
Stripe is the payment rail underneath a business, not the storefront itself — Squarespace, Shopify or a custom checkout sits on top of it, and Stripe’s job is to make sure the money moves and the fraud gets caught without anyone watching each transaction individually.
Get Stripe
Buying the tool is not the hard part.
The ebook is about what to hand over, in what order, and how you find out when it goes wrong. One payment, no subscription.