Stripe's revenue engine is deceptively simple on the surface: take 2.9% plus 30 cents on every card transaction processed in the US. Multiply that by $1.4 trillion in 2024 payment volume. But that headline number obscures the real economics. After interchange fees flow back to card networks and issuing banks, Stripe keeps its "net revenue" — estimated at $5.1 billion for FY2024. That's the actual top line. The company reportedly turned profitable on a net income basis in 2024, ending years of deliberate growth-over-margin spending. The interesting part isn't the core processing fee. It's everything else. Stripe Connect charges platforms additional fees for seller onboarding, payment splitting, compliance management, and cross-border payouts. A marketplace running on Connect pays meaningfully more per transaction than a simple merchant using Checkout — and they're almost impossible to churn because the integration touches identity verification, tax reporting, dispute handling, and payout logic simultaneously. Billing generates SaaS-style recurring revenue from subscription businesses that need invoicing, usage-based pricing, dunning, and revenue recognition. Tax charges per-transaction for automated sales tax, VAT, and GST calculation across 50+ jurisdictions. Radar sells premium fraud prevention trained on the entire network's data — a genuine network effect where every new merchant makes fraud detection better for all merchants. Treasury and Issuing represent the embedded finance play: platforms can offer their customers bank accounts and debit cards without obtaining banking licenses. Stripe provides the infrastructure; partner banks provide the charter. The operating model is asset-light. No deposits. No loan book. No branches. Just software sitting between merchants, networks, banks, and 100+ local payment methods, routing complexity through code rather than balance sheet. With 8,500 employees generating $5.1 billion in net revenue, that's roughly $600,000 in revenue per head — lean by any standard. The $159 billion valuation implies investors are paying about 31x net revenue. Expensive for a payments company. Reasonable for a software platform with 70%+ gross margins on its non-processing products and a customer base that gets stickier with every additional product adopted.