I believe this is often because of tax purposes. Dealing with international jurisdictions gets complicated and it may not be worth it to Stripe if they believe they can hire enough talent within NA.
It’s not that they couldn’t, it’s just that they don’t see the value in doing so.
We have increased the places we can hire remotely from.
[...]
We now have the capability to hire remote employees in
Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India,
Indonesia, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands,
Singapore, Sweden, UK, and the U.S.
They're most likely outsourcing it, that list is too random and one shot to be any epxertise grown in house.
In any case, I'm still skeptical, they could have been paying people in USD as contractors since day dot if that was the real problem, but its not, its timezones.
According to Stripe employees in the thread, the problem is that Stripe works in a heavily regulated industry (credit card processing) and that introduces difficulties that couldn’t be solved by paying people as contractors
If you’re looking for something with a few more features then I recently discovered https://appwrite.io
It includes database (Firestore), storage (Cloud Storage), users (Firebase Auth) and more, plus you can host it yourself. I haven’t used it myself yet but keeping a close eye on it.
It’s not that they couldn’t, it’s just that they don’t see the value in doing so.