To mitigate the threat of climate change, the majority of climate models agree that the world will need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on the scale of approximately 6 gigatons of CO₂ per year by 2050. That’s roughly the equivalent of the United States’ annual emissions.

Last year, Stripe announced our Negative Emissions Commitment, pledging at least $1M per year to pay, at any price, for the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and its sequestration in secure long-term storage. We’ve since built a small team within Stripe to focus on creating a market for carbon removal by being an early customer for promising negative emissions technologies.

Today, after a rigorous search and review by a panel of independent scientific experts^[1], we’re excited to announce our first purchases. Our request for projects garnered a wide range of negative emissions technologies which came in two broad categories.

• Carbon storage in the biosphere: These projects include planting trees or modifying agricultural practices to store more carbon in soil. These projects are relatively less expensive and benefit from immediate scale (we can plant trees today), but have shorter long-term permanence since trees can be easily burned down and carbon storage in soil can be short lived. These solutions alone are unlikely to sustain the necessary 6-15 gigatons of annual CO₂ removal.

• Carbon storage outside of the biosphere: Projects in this more nascent category store carbon in places besides plants and soil. Examples include directly capturing CO₂ from the atmosphere and injecting it into stable rock formations underground or sequestering CO₂ in concrete via mineralization. These solutions are scarce and dramatically underfunded. If they can proliferate and scale, they’ll complement in-biosphere solutions by bringing new benefits: thousand-year or longer permanence and vast carbon storage using minimal arable land.

The world will need a portfolio of negative emissions approaches across these two categories to meet the 2 degree warming target sensibly adopted by many governments. We believe Stripe can make the most impact by focusing our purchases on the latter category to help these solutions improve.

Stripe’s first purchases

From 24 promising applications, we’ve selected four high potential projects that exemplify the kinds of innovation required to advance the field. We’re especially excited to be the first purchaser from three of the four projects. In cases where the projects are still quite early and have low capacity in 2020, we’ve pre-purchased volume for future years.

Climeworks
Capture + storage
Zurich, Switzerland • 322.5 tons at $775 per ton^[2]

Climeworks uses renewable geothermal energy and waste heat to capture CO₂ directly from the air, concentrate it, and permanently sequester it underground in basaltic rock formations with Carbfix. While it’s early in scaling, the capacity of this approach is theoretically nearly limitless. It’s also permanent and straightforward to measure. Climeworks has an ambitious cost and volume curve, with a long-term price target of $100-200 per ton. Though this technology is expensive today, we’re optimistic it will decrease in cost quickly with more early purchasers.

Project Vesta
Capture + storage
San Francisco, USA • 3,333.3 tons at $75 per ton

Project Vesta captures CO₂ by using an abundant, naturally occurring mineral called olivine. Ocean waves grind down the olivine, increasing its surface area. As the olivine breaks down, it captures atmospheric CO₂ from within the ocean and stabilizes it as limestone on the seafloor. This is a compelling approach because it provides permanent sequestration with the potential for very high volume at low cost. Questions remain about safety and viability: to validate coastal enhanced weathering, more lab experiments and pilot beach projects must be performed. Stripe is Project Vesta’s first customer and our purchase will accelerate their safety study and deployment timeline.

CarbonCure
Storage only
Halifax, Canada • 2,500 tons at $100 per ton

CarbonCure’s technology sequesters CO₂ in concrete by mineralizing it into calcium carbonate (CaCO₃)—as a bonus, this has the side effect of actually strengthening the concrete. This solution is compelling because it’s permanent, relatively low cost, and could scale to the size of the global concrete market, sequestering >0.5 gigatons of CO₂ annually. Today, CarbonCure captures most of its CO₂ from industrial emitters such as ethanol, fertilizer, or cement plants. In the future, CarbonCure’s technology could use CO₂ from direct air capture technologies once they become more readily available and economical, forming a full negative emissions technology. Stripe is CarbonCure’s first customer to purchase carbon sequestration, and the transaction will enable them to subsidize their costs.

Charm Industrial
Storage only
San Francisco, USA • 416 tons at $600 per ton

Charm Industrial has created a novel process for preparing and injecting bio-oil into geologic storage. Bio-oil is produced from biomass and maintains much of the carbon that was captured naturally by the plants. By injecting it into secure geologic storage, they’re making the carbon storage permanent. Stripe is Charm Industrial’s first customer for this approach, and Stripe’s purchase lets them begin testing this year.

Open-sourcing our materials

Over the last few months, we’ve brought together experts across a series of disciplines and institutions to guide us. We have published our process, applications, and project database on GitHub to equip other potential purchasers with better information and encourage transparency in negative emissions purchasing.

We’ve also partnered with CarbonPlan, a non-profit that evaluates carbon removal technologies and maintains a public database of project reports with independent analysis and visualization of public data, including each project application considered by Stripe.

Expanding our commitment

Much like the early-stage businesses that get started on Stripe, we recognize that many of the future impactful projects are still quite nascent today.

In addition to reducing our own emissions, and helping projects transition from R&D to commercial deployment by purchasing at any price per ton, Stripe will expand its commitment to advance negative emissions technologies by:

• Funding early-stage research to increase the number of projects with a credible path to achieving ambitious impact.
• Raising money to create a large-scale market for carbon removal. We’ve been encouraged by how many businesses, including many Stripe users, have offered to purchase alongside us. We’d like to make it easier for companies to contribute to the most promising and impactful negative emissions technologies and measure their impact.

We’ve developed a set of project criteria that characterize the kinds of solutions needed to help round out the existing gaps in the negative emissions portfolio. Stripe is excited to support projects that have the potential to achieve these criteria by 2040, even if they don’t yet achieve them today.

We hope that this approach will accelerate technological developments to remove and store carbon at the required scale, cost, and quality level.

Call to action

Our goal is not only to remove carbon from the atmosphere, but to become an early member of an ecosystem of funders and founders who will invent ways to solve the world’s largest collective problem. We continue to search for great projects, purchasers, and experts. Please reach out to us to work together on this effort or to give us any feedback. We can be reached at climate@stripe.com. (And if you’re an engineer or designer who cares about climate impact, consider joining our team).

[1] We’re grateful for our panel of experts who advised on our process, reviewed applications, and provided guidance. Reviewers included Dr. Jennifer Wilcox (Professor, Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Dr. Phil Renforth (Associate Professor, Heriot-Watt University), Dr. Steven Hamburg (Chief Scientist, Environmental Defense Fund), Dr. Jane Zelikova (Chief Scientist, Carbon180), Andrew Bergman (PhD candidate, Harvard), Dr. Bill Anderegg (Assistant Professor, University of Utah), Dr. Colin McCormick, and Dr. Zara L’Heureux.

[2] Climeworks Carbon Dioxide Removal pricing conditions are a function of various parameters, one being the volume of the purchase agreement.

Stripe Billing is designed to be the fastest way for ambitious businesses to set up recurring subscriptions or one-off invoices. Companies such as Slack, The Atlantic, Notion, and Postmates use Billing so they can focus their engineering resources on their core business instead of building and maintaining a subscription-management system. And they get key advantages because Billing is deeply integrated into the Stripe payments stack—for example, our customers recovered 41% of failed payments last year through automatic card updates, smart retries, and other included capabilities.

Over the past few months, we’ve added several new features to Stripe Billing to help you support more business models, shave time off of your operations, and let you bill customers globally with advanced invoicing features:

More flexible billing logic

• Subscription schedules: With subscription schedules, you can more easily configure changes to subscriptions, including starting a subscription on a future date, backdating a subscription, or upgrading or downgrading a subscription on a future date.

  

• Sub-cent billing: Decimal amounts for pricing let you charge unit prices of a fraction of a cent for a subscription or invoice. For example, a cloud storage SaaS business might want to charge $0.0005 per MB used.

• Subscription pending updates: Pending updates let you make a change to a subscription only when a payment succeeds. For example, if your customers add a seat or upgrade to a more expensive plan, you can now charge them a prorated amount right away (or restrict access to your service if the payment fails).

Shortcuts to save you time

• MRR by product and plan: The Billing analytics dashboard provides time-saving charts and analytics right out of the box so you don’t have to spend time building them yourself. You can now view monthly recurring revenue (MRR) by specific products and plans to measure the health and trajectory of distinct parts of your business.

  

• subscription.new and invoice.new: Does your team create a lot of invoices or subscriptions from the Dashboard? We added some shortcuts. You can just type subscription.new or invoice.new in any browser to save a few clicks.

  And once you’re there, Billing’s new invoice and subscription editors are faster to use and let you create customer records in-line. Saving just a few seconds for each transaction adds up fast for your operational teams.

Customized and compliant invoicing

• Send invoices from your own domain: Your business might send a lot of invoices, receipts, and other emails via Stripe. In order to maintain a consistent brand experience, you can now send these from your own custom domain.

• Line item credit notes: We’ve improved our credit notes functionality to make it fast and easy to adjust specific line items on a finalized invoice via the Dashboard or the API. This helps keep your records accurate and gives you an easy way to issue refunds or credit customers when an invoice changes.

  

• Flexible invoice numbering: Invoices can now be numbered sequentially across your entire account—this is particularly useful for businesses that have to stay compliant with local invoicing regulations in Europe. If you’re migrating from an older invoicing system, you can start with any arbitrary invoice number to continue an existing sequence.

  

We’ll continue to add features to Stripe Billing that give your business flexibility as it grows. To get started with Billing, visit the overview—you can use all of these new features either from the Dashboard or via the API. As always, please let us know if you have any questions or feedback—we’d love to hear from you.

Millions of businesses rely on Stripe to accept payments safely. Our goal is to help those businesses maximize payments from legitimate customers, while minimizing their losses to fraud.

Online fraud causes unnecessary losses for most online businesses; for some, it can be so expensive that it threatens their viability. Accordingly, Stripe has been investing in industry-leading fraud prevention technology since 2015. Radar uses advanced machine learning (optionally augmented by human-supplied rules) to shield Stripe users from hundreds of millions of dollars of fraudulent transactions every month.

As the online economy grows, online fraud is becoming more sophisticated, and Stripe dedicates large teams to improving Radar’s accuracy and building defenses that better-protect Stripe users.

As part of Stripe’s fraud prevention, we use fraud signals detected by Stripe.js and our mobile SDKs. These signals are most commonly used to identify “bots”—scripted web browsers that make fraudulent transactions. Signals we pay attention to include things like screen resolution and browsing patterns. Stripe’s ability to use these real-time signals is part of why Radar is so effective: in a domain where even small improvements can be a big deal, they reduce the expected number of fraud-driven chargebacks a business will receive by 11%.

In response to some recent questions about how we use signals gathered via Stripe.js and our mobile SDKs, we have made some updates to provide additional clarity:

• We updated our privacy and cookie policies to make it clear that our advanced fraud detection signals are used only for security and anti-fraud purposes. Stripe doesn’t—and won’t—share or sell this data to advertisers.
• We put up a page with more details about the advanced fraud detection signals we collect.
• We’ve added the ability for site and app owners to disable advanced fraud detection signals.

We hope these updates make our commitment to our users even clearer. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Stripe Issuing is an API that allows you to create and control virtual and physical cards. Today, we’re opening access to all businesses in the US, so you can sign up and start creating cards instantly.

We built Issuing to help businesses manage how funds get spent. Companies like Zipcar want to help renters fill up the gas tank without using their personal cards. Companies like Postmates want to help couriers pay for orders without allowing unapproved purchases. These businesses couldn’t just hand out corporate expense cards—they needed to create their own cards.

The card issuance industry today looks a lot like what the payments industry did a decade ago—it can take months to integrate to a provider and manufacture cards, only to get rigid capabilities on a legacy stack. We set out to launch the first issuance platform built for developers. Our self-serve APIs and public docs give developers the tools to build the unexpected. We even created a new manufacturing process so businesses can customize physical cards from Day 1.

Now, any US business can instantly launch a commercial card program, right from their Dashboard, at no cost to get started. And Issuing comes packed with capabilities that ensure that any business—from a new startup to a tech giant—can build flexible cards with our APIs.

Pricing

Issuing has everything you need to create a card program, with no setup or monthly fees. Create virtual cards for 10¢ per card and get branded physical cards shipped to your door for just $3 per card. We’ll waive transaction fees for the first $500K in transaction volume—after that, each card transaction costs 0.2% + 20¢. For companies with large volume or unique business models, custom economics are available.

Any business in the US can now activate Issuing from the Dashboard to instantly launch a commercial card program. If you’re outside the US, you can get notified when Issuing is available in your country. If you have any feedback or questions, we’d love to hear from you.

Stripe Issuing cards offered under this program are issued by Regions Bank, an Alabama FDIC-insured state bank.

Card Issuing services may require approval and are subject to terms and conditions.

Stripe enables businesses in many countries worldwide to onboard easily so they can accept payments as quickly as possible. Stripe’s scale makes our platform a common target for payments fraud and cybercrime, so we’ve built a deep understanding of the patterns bad actors use. We take these threats seriously because they harm both our users and our ecosystem; every fraudulent transaction we circumvent keeps anyone impacted from having a bad day.

We provide our risk analysts with automated tools to make informed decisions while sifting legitimate users from potentially fraudulent accounts. One of the most useful tools we’ve developed uses machine learning to identify similar clusters of accounts created by fraudsters trying to scale their operations. Many of these attempts are easy to detect and we can reverse engineer the fingerprints they leave behind to shut them down in real-time. In turn, this allows our analysts to spend more time on sophisticated cases that have the potential to do more harm to our users.

Read more

In April 2017, Stripe launched Increment, a quarterly print and digital magazine about how teams build and operate software systems at scale. Its mission? To act as a dependable resource, offering stories, insights, and advice to inspire and support developers—with valuable learnings from some of the tech industry’s most effective software teams.

As a software company building economic infrastructure, creating a physical print magazine was, perhaps, a non-obvious choice. But two and a half years in, we’ve published 11 issues and over 100 stories, representing the work of many dozens of editorial contributors and illustrators. We’ve shared Nadia Eghbal’s take on future expectations for open-source, Alvaro Videla’s analogy of programming as translation, Glenn Fleishman’s exploration of COBOL’s many-decade journey, and Juan Pablo Buriticá and Katie Womersley’s guide to distributed engineering teams. We’ve talked about cloud capacity planning, testing in production, on-call best practices, and mental health. And while we had full-color copies on hand—on actual, touchable paper—at conferences and events we attended, Increment in print was not yet for sale.

Our readers have regularly asked us when we would make it easier to get print copies of Increment. Today, we’re excited to share that print subscriptions are here. (You can purchase issues from our complete back catalog, too.)

We’re thankful for the readers and community—you are the reason we publish Increment. If you have ideas for future issues or authors we should feature, please reach out—we’d love to hear from you. Happy reading.