This comparison comes up in almost every New Zealand ecommerce and fintech project we scope, and it usually gets decided on the wrong criteria — normally a rate card someone found online. We've integrated both providers many times over. Here's the honest version.
The short answer: Stripe wins on integration, Windcave wins on local acquiring and in-store. If your business is purely online and subscription-shaped, Stripe. If you take payments at a counter as well as a checkout, Windcave. Everything below is the detail behind that.
Pricing: published vs negotiated
These two price in fundamentally different ways, and comparing them fairly takes more work than it should.
Stripe publishes. In New Zealand that's 2.65% + NZ$0.30 for domestic cards, 3.5% + NZ$0.30 for international, an extra 2% where currency conversion is needed, and NZ$25 per dispute (refunded if you win). You can model your costs before you talk to anyone, which is genuinely useful. It's also rack rate — high for real domestic volume, and negotiable once you have it.
Windcave quotes. Pricing is per-merchant and typically arrives as three line items: a monthly fee, a per-transaction fee, and a separate merchant service rate. Their blended billing model rolls interchange, scheme and acquirer fees into one percentage.
That structural difference matters more since the Commerce Commission capped interchange on New Zealand-issued cards in December 2025. Under a blended rate, a drop in underlying interchange is invisible to you — the percentage stays the same and your provider's margin widens. Under interchange-plus you see the components and the saving lands in your statement. Whichever provider you choose, ask what an interchange-plus quote looks like. (We went into that in more depth in our guide to NZ payment gateway costs.)
How to compare them properly: take last month's settlement file, split your volume into domestic debit, domestic credit, international and Amex, and run both quotes across that actual mix. Comparing headline percentages tells you almost nothing, because Stripe's headline covers every card type and Windcave's doesn't.
Local acquiring
Stripe processes New Zealand cards, but the acquiring relationship sits offshore. Windcave has genuine local acquiring.
That shows up in two places most comparisons miss. First, decline rates — domestic cards processed through a local acquirer generally authorise better than the same cards processed offshore. On a high-volume checkout, a one-point difference in authorisation rate dwarfs a 0.2% difference in fees. Second, settlement timing into a New Zealand bank account, which changes your working capital position in a way the rate card never shows.
If your customers are overwhelmingly New Zealand-based, this is the strongest argument for Windcave, and it's the one that gets ignored.
In-store and unattended
Not really a contest. Windcave does in-store terminals and unattended (kiosk, vending, parking) payments as a first-class product, and the whole thing reconciles against the same merchant account as your online sales.
Stripe has Terminal, and it's fine, but the New Zealand hardware and support story is thinner. If you're running a retail floor and a website and you want one settlement file, Windcave is the straightforward answer.
Integration effort
This is where Stripe pulls decisively ahead, and it's usually the deciding factor for software businesses.
Stripe's SDKs, documentation and test tooling are the best in the industry, and the surrounding products replace real engineering:
- Billing — subscriptions, proration, dunning and invoicing that would otherwise be months of work
- Connect — marketplace payment splits, which is genuinely hard to build yourself
- Radar — fraud scoring that's useful out of the box
- Checkout and Elements — PCI scope reduced to a questionnaire, with a checkout that converts well
Windcave's hosted payment pages keep card data off your servers and your PCI scope small, which covers the same compliance need competently. But the developer experience is a different generation, and if you're building anything subscription-shaped you'll be writing logic that Stripe would have given you.
For a straightforward one-off checkout, this gap barely matters. For a SaaS product, it's the whole decision.
Support
Windcave will give you a New Zealand phone number and a human in your timezone. Stripe's support is documentation-first, with escalation paths that improve considerably with volume.
Which of those you value depends on your team. A business with in-house engineers usually prefers Stripe's docs to anyone's phone line. A business without them very reasonably wants someone to call when the checkout stops taking money on a Saturday morning.
So which one?
Choose Stripe if you're SaaS or subscription-based, you have engineering resource, your customers are international, or you need marketplace splits. The integration savings will exceed the rate difference for most of these.
Choose Windcave if you sell in-store as well as online, your customers are predominantly New Zealanders, you're processing enough domestic volume for local acquiring economics to bite, or you want a local support relationship.
Consider both — genuinely. Running Windcave for domestic cards and Stripe for international and subscriptions is a common and sensible pattern once volume justifies the extra integration. Two providers is more reconciliation work, but at scale the economics can be clearly worth it.
The one thing we'd push back on is choosing either from a rate card alone. Effective rate — total fees divided by total volume — is the only number that compares fairly, and it depends on a card mix that's specific to your business.
If you want that modelled against your actual transaction data rather than a hypothetical, our fintech team does this regularly, and we don't have a partnership with either provider that would make the answer come out a particular way.
Stripe rates cited are those published in July 2026. Windcave pricing is quoted per merchant. Confirm current figures with both before deciding.