💳 The PSP Saga: how I ended up on American fintech

· 4 min read

In a time where everyone is talking about reducing dependence on American big-tech, I spent last week doing the opposite. I switched from a Dutch payment provider to an American one.

Not in a “I love hyperscalers” way. In a “I have run out of options” way.

The setup

You may have read about my eSIM side project. It’s a small webshop selling prepaid eSIM data bundles for travel. No subscriptions. No recurring billing. Customers buy a bundle, pay once, and the eSIM gets generated automatically. That’s it.

To accept iDEAL (sorry, “iDEAL | Wero”) payments, you need a PSP, a Payment Service Provider. The PSP sits between your checkout flow and the bank rails. They handle the regulated bits so you don’t have to.

I needed one. I went looking.

The candidates

My first pick was Mollie. Their API is good, I have built integrations against it for clients, and the documentation is solid. So that was the obvious choice.

Then the email arrived: my shop apparently falls into one of the categories Mollie applies a minimum monthly invoice of 50 euro to, regardless of actual transaction volume. For a side project that does maybe a handful of transactions a day, that is a commitment I was not ready to make. Maybe later. Not yet.

So I went shopping. I’ll spare the names:

  • Provider 1: Ignored my onboarding request for a while. When they did respond, the answer was “sure, but you have to subscribe to a 250 euro per month package.” Pass.
  • Provider 2: Rejected me as a customer outright. No reason given.
  • Provider 3: Ignored my requests to become a customer.
  • Provider 4: Too small for me. Or rather, I was too small for them. They politely declined.

Then there was Moneybird, my accounting tool. They have something called “Online betaalmethoden” that lets you take payments through Moneybird itself. On paper, ideal: I already use Moneybird, the rates are fine, it’s Dutch. In practice, the flow does not match my stack. Moneybird requires an invoice to exist before you can attach a payment to it. In my checkout, the invoice gets generated after a successful payment, not before. I asked support if there was a way around it. There is not.

That left Provider 5, another Dutch PSP. I actually used them for a while. They were expensive, the dashboard felt dated, the API was missing essential features, and the docs for the API they did ship were thin. But the payments worked. For a few months, that was good enough.

It stopped being good enough.

The Stripe question

There was always Stripe. I had been deliberately avoiding it. Not because the product is bad. The product is great. The issue, for me, is geopolitical: a European webshop selling to European customers, settled through European banks, should not need to route through an American payments company to make iDEAL work.

But at some point, principles meet reality. Every Dutch option had either rejected me, ignored me, priced me out, or did not fit my stack. And I was paying a premium to a Dutch PSP whose API made me grumble every time I touched it.

So I switched. Stripe now handles iDEAL payments for eSIM op reis. The developer experience is in a different league than Provider 5’s. That part I will give them.

I am not happy that I had to do this. But I am happy with how it works.

What I would tell another small Dutch webshop

A few things I learned the hard way:

  • Mollie’s 50-euro minimum is real. It used to be that you only paid for what you used. That changed. If you are doing low volume, factor it in before you commit.
  • Onboarding is the actual filter. The technical integration is rarely the hard part. Whether a PSP wants you as a customer is. Some want only enterprise. Some want only e-commerce with a track record. Some just don’t reply.
  • Moneybird’s payment flow assumes you invoice first. If you generate invoices post-payment (which is normal for prepaid digital goods), it will not fit. Don’t waste time building around it.

The bigger picture

I would love to move back to a Dutch (or at least European) provider one day. Maybe Mollie’s volume threshold drops. Maybe one of the smaller players ships a real API. Maybe Wero (the European iDEAL successor) gets a serious open ecosystem behind it and someone builds a competitive PSP on top of it. EU fintech could really use the competition.

For now though, the practical option won. If you are about to ask me “should I just go with Stripe?”: it depends. My honest answer will probably still be Mollie. But really, ask me. The right PSP for your shop is not the one I happened to land on.