There’s no shortage of ways to take payments.
You can use Square. You can use PayPal. There are dozens of others depending on where you are and how you run your business.
We didn’t pick Stripe because it was the only option.
We picked it because it aligns with how this product needs to work.
Fetch isn’t just collecting payments. It’s tying payments to bookings, clients, services, and everything that happens around them. That requires more than a checkout button, it requires infrastructure.
Stripe is built for that.
It handles one-time payments, invoicing, subscriptions, taxes, and stored payment methods in a way that stays consistent across the entire platform. More importantly, it’s designed for software platforms that manage multiple businesses, not just a single business taking payments.
That distinction matters.
Tools like Square are excellent for in-person transactions and point-of-sale setups. PayPal is widely recognized and easy to adopt. Both solve real problems, and for many businesses, they work well.
But Fetch is an online system first.
Everything runs through scheduling, client records, and workflows. Payments aren’t a separate step, they’re part of the system. We needed something that could support that level of integration without introducing friction or fragmentation.
Stripe gave us that.
Could we support multiple payment providers? Yes.
But every additional provider adds complexity – for us and for the professionals using Fetch.
Different checkout experiences. Different edge cases. Different failure points. More support. More inconsistency.
That tradeoff doesn’t improve the product. It weakens it.
So we made a decision early: standardize on one system that does this well, and build everything around it.
Stripe isn’t the only good option out there.
It’s the one that lets Fetch perform the way our professionals expect it should.