Platforms can now use Connect just for the payouts portion of their business. Without changing any existing methods of accepting payments, platforms can use Connect Payouts to top up their Stripe account from a bank account and pay out recipients through the Dashboard or via the API. Now, more platforms can take advantage of Stripe Connect’s payout automation, reporting and verification.

Pay recipients faster with less manual work

To pay recipients today, many platforms’ workflows require managing multiple CSVs, scrolling through countless rows of payment data, mailing paper checks, and manually tracking payouts. Stripe’s Dashboard tools and flexible API bring your data together in one place and automate manual processes to help your team save time and money.

We were wasting countless hours manually tracking our payouts to sellers with ACH. When we switched to Connect Payouts, we were able to automate our payout process while rapidly scaling our business. It’s saved us a ton of engineering work and tracking has been significantly easier.
— Jenny Gonsalves, VP of Engineering, Lyra Health

Send funds via the API or through the Dashboard

Previously, Stripe Connect required that payouts were linked to incoming payments. Now, you can use Connect Payouts to top up your Stripe account via a linked bank account and pay out recipients as needed through the Dashboard or automatically via the API.

We used to pay sellers with paper checks. But bandwidth constraints on our accounting team, challenges verifying mailing addresses, and the risk of checks getting lost in the mail meant they sometimes waited weeks to get paid. Since implementing Connect Payouts, sellers are paid automatically in three days or less—they love it and regularly mention it in Yelp reviews.
— Dennis Bron, Head of Growth and Business Intelligence, Shift

New use cases for existing platforms with Top-ups

If your platform currently uses Stripe Connect in the US, you can also take advantage of the new Top-ups functionality. You can now add additional funds to your Stripe account as needed from a linked bank account, which should help make some use cases that were previously tricky to operationalize easier:

• Sending bonuses or other one-off payouts, unrelated to a customer payment
• Paying sellers or service providers (“connected accounts”) the full amount while simultaneously providing discounts to customers
• Enabling faster payouts by paying connected accounts before the charged funds are available

How to use Top-ups and Connect Payouts

1. Top up your Stripe account via a linked bank account:

2. Send payouts to recipients through the Dashboard or automatically via the API. (You can onboard your recipients using Connect Express’s pre-built UI flows or customize everything with our API.)

Connect Payouts and Top-ups are available to platforms based in the US to start. If you’re interested, you can try out these new features in test mode or learn more in our docs.

We’d love to hear your feedback. Please reach out if you have any questions or comments.

Today, we’re launching the Stripe Partner Program to amplify and help grow our platform, plugin, and extension partners.

Thousands of companies like Shopify, DocuSign, WooCommerce, and Xero work with Stripe to let businesses and individuals accept payments directly within their products. Other companies, like Segment or Avalara, build extensions that add new features and capabilities to the Stripe platform.

Stripe’s APIs and operational infrastructure help partners bring businesses online and enable new types of businesses. We help handle everything related to payments, including global compliance, 24x7 payments support, and supporting the latest features.

We’ve been thrilled to see the new payment experiences that our partners have built and we’ve designed our program to enable them to build and launch faster, reach more customers, and operate at scale.

Registering for the Stripe Partner Program is free. Partners get access to documentation and best practices collected from across the Stripe network to help them optimize their integration and launch quickly and easily.

Partners can also choose to become a Stripe Verified Partner to get additional benefits—from the ability to escalate support requests on behalf of their customers to a listing in our curated partners gallery to reach Stripe businesses. (Learn more about the verification process and pricing.)

This is just the start. We’re excited to build more products and resources for our partners in the future. If you have any questions, feedback, or are considering building an integration, please get in touch!

Let’s grow the internet economy together. Become a partner

Today, we’re excited to share that we’re launching free 24x7 phone and chat support for all Stripe users. In addition to the email support we already offer, you’ll now be able to reach us via phone or chat from support.stripe.com after logging in.

Providing great support at scale is complex. Stripe now serves millions of businesses worldwide. To provide responsive support over phone, chat, and email, we’ve invested in every aspect of how we serve our users over the past few years—from building infrastructure and tooling to hiring teammates across 9 offices and all timezones. Our priority is getting you the right answer no matter how you choose to contact us and we’re continuously working to make every support interaction better.

We also treat support as a learning engine. We’ve built internal systems that turn standard support metrics into detailed insights that help with everything from routing and categorizing questions more efficiently to providing the right contextual information. Many of the improvements our engineering teams make to Stripe’s products and features stem from reading the syntheses of support issues.

We hope these additional ways to reach the Stripe team help you and your business. Phone and chat support will be available in English to start. Email support will continue to be available in English, German, French, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. If you have a technical question, you’re also welcome to hop into the #stripe IRC channel on freenode.

We rely on your feedback to improve our products and features, so please let us know how we can better support you.

Get help with a question or give us feedback.
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Stripe uses Amazon Web Services to power our infrastructure. With AWS, we can dynamically scale our fleet of servers in real-time. This elasticity enables us to reliably serve a rapidly growing user base and scale along with their businesses. We use AWS Reserved Instances, which allow us to predictably forecast our cloud spend given a dynamic fleet with rapidly changing compute requirements.

One of the biggest problems in cloud computing is capacity planning: the ability to forecast your compute power requirements and manage the budget allocated to AWS servers. At Stripe, we started by solely using reserved instances to manage pricing for individual instances, but today we can dynamically and reliably understand costs as our fleet changes over time. Reserved instances allow us to make cost-effective decisions through careful resource management. We’ve developed an easy-to-use framework for automating our purchase decisions, which we’ll outline in this post.

Read more

Over the next few weeks, we’re rolling out new features in the Dashboard to help marketplaces and platforms efficiently run their business on Stripe Connect. With these improvements, you can send funds to your sellers or service providers (“connected accounts”), see detailed breakdowns of an account’s recent activity, and quickly update account information directly in the Connect portion of the Dashboard.

Managing your platform’s day-to-day operations can be cumbersome for your finance, support, and operations teams—especially as you scale to thousands of connected accounts and beyond. Early beta users tell us that these new insights and tools allow their teams to field issues more effectively and independently, saving them and their engineering teams hours every month.

Send transfers and payouts from the Dashboard

Regardless of your Connect account type—Standard, Express, or Custom—you can now move funds to your connected accounts straight from the Dashboard instead of creating a transfer through the API. If you’re a Connect Custom or Express user, you can also create payouts. By enabling transfers and payouts in the Dashboard, you can scale your user support and payouts management, without requiring your engineering team to build custom tools.

Edit account details with ease

We’ve also made changes that streamline common workflows. Previously, viewing and updating settings for your connected accounts was a relatively cumbersome process. It’s now possible to handle these tasks from your Dashboard. All platforms can inspect recent payment or payout activity and view specific account balances, while Custom and Express platforms can also easily update payout schedules for their connected accounts. Custom platforms can also update identity information and banking details.

Easy access to more information about connected accounts

We’ve also updated the account page to provide more insight into your connected accounts.

Account Header

The new header surfaces more information about the account at a glance. You can now quickly see the account’s balance, lifetime volume, and whether or not it has payments and payouts enabled.

Balance

The new ‘Balance’ section provides a summary of how much money the connected account has in its Stripe account balance. Additionally, it’s possible for administrators to send funds to connected accounts in seconds.

Activity

The new ‘Activity’ section improves upon the old ‘Transfers’ section and now lists the recent payments, transfers, payouts, and collected fees associated with a connected account.

Metadata Search

We’ve also added the ability to search for connected accounts by metadata so that you can find what you need faster, with relevant keywords.

Clear verification statuses for Connect Custom Accounts

In the new Dashboard, we’ve made the verification explanations better and clearer. If one of your connected accounts had its payouts paused, this will now be highlighted in red alongside a remediation suggestion. These updates help Connect Custom platforms proactively resolve verification issues.

These updates are the first of many improvements coming to the Dashboard that will help your team run more efficiently. The updated Dashboard is rolling out to all Connect platforms in each of Stripe’s 25 supported countries in the next few weeks.

You can learn more about the updates in our documentation or check out our guide to getting started.

Have questions or want to get early access? Get in touch.

We’ve added a number of new features to Stripe Payments over the last few months that might be useful for your business:

We hope that these new features will help your business. If you’re new to Stripe, you can explore all of our payments features or see a demo of them in action.

If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know!

Today, we’re adding support for creating a limited liability company (LLC) with Stripe Atlas. It’s been one of the most requested features from our users, and we’re excited to make it possible.

LLCs and C Corporations

We started Stripe Atlas as an easy way to create a Delaware C Corporation. They are the entity of choice for many investor-backed technology companies, but they’re not for everyone. LLCs, on the other hand, are used by many small teams, bootstrapped businesses, and side projects seeking a more flexible start.

Startups are continuous creation machines, running experiments and rearchitecting themselves on the fly. Legal choices often force startups to predict the future: is this a side project or the next Google? We think that some founders stop because they aren’t certain yet. So we sought to give founders more options to just get started.

The Stripe Atlas LLC

Founders can now use Stripe Atlas to form an LLC in days. The Stripe Atlas LLC has the features common to LLCs: limited liability for founders and the flexibility to be taxed as an individual. But LLCs are used for everything from holding companies to restaurants, and we wanted the Stripe Atlas LLC templates to help meet the needs of technology startups. Orrick designed the Stripe Atlas legal documents to match the ways founders tell us they want to work. For example, the Stripe Atlas LLC:

• Enables founders to assign relevant IP to the company at formation, formalizing ownership of key technology.
• Is designed to make conversion to a C Corporation as simple as possible. (We can connect Stripe Atlas users to a lawyer to manage the conversion process with discounted, flat-rate packages).
• Provides a simplified process for adding members after formation.
• Is organized in Delaware, the jurisdiction of choice for many new LLCs.

You can read more about the Stripe Atlas LLC—and tradeoffs between an LLC and C Corporation—in this guide.

Forming an LLC through Stripe Atlas will cost the same as a C Corporation: $500 gets you a new entity, tax ID, U.S. business bank account, Stripe account, access to expert tax and legal advice from our partners, tools for handling taxes, and credits with a number of services. You’ll also join the Stripe Atlas Community, where you can connect with other founders, learn from experts, and get practical advice. We’re starting in beta, and folks who request an invite will hear back within a couple weeks.

Over the last two years, thousands of founders from over 130 countries—ranging from side projects to startups funded by Y Combinator—have used Stripe Atlas. We’ve been delighted by their progress, and can’t wait to see what you build.

Form an LLC with Stripe Atlas Request an invite