It's business 100 to not waste money. If 1% is not a lot to save you have a hobby, not a business. I do see you enjoy using every service imaginable. I imagine you are building your dumb idea on top of Amazon SES or sendgrid. And you even used some other dumbass start up to make an email submit form for new startups. You're a pro.
Stripe is an amazing service and their founders are amazing people. I wish I could blow them, but they probably wouldn't even let me b/c the VCs are already all over that. On the other hand, for people who enjoy saving money, becoming PCI compliant and saving 1% + trans fees is another alternative and there are numerous tutorials available to help anyone do that within a few hours even if you are severely autistic.
There's tons of risk. Did you know a TON of email servers and spam blockers click all the links in emails and analyze what is linked as well? How do you know you won't be charged for those?
You can negotiate all those BS fees to $0. For example.. I pay 0.1% + interchange. $0.05 per transaction gateway fee and $0.10 cc trans fee (includes AVS). $5/mo base fee. NOTHING ELSE (well chargeback fees, everywhere has that).
You have no clue what you're talking about. I guarantee Stripe will charge you CB fees too.
Only way Stripe is worth the time and % they jack it up is if you do LOW volume.
edit: 5 seconds in google and Stripe charges $15 for a chargeback, same as Chase. Basically paying Stripe 1% + another $0.15 or so per transaction. NO THANKS! No one doing any type of CC volume would be dumb enough to give that $ away.
If 1% of your revenue is worth not spending a few hours to figure out BS PCI stuff I suggest you rethink your priorities or you're doing really low volume where 1% is like $5.