Color contrast is an important aspect of accessibility. Good contrast makes it easier for people with visual impairments to use products, and helps in imperfect conditions like low-light environments or older screens. With this in mind, we recently updated the colors in our user interfaces to be more accessible. Text and icon colors now reliably have legible contrast throughout the Stripe Dashboard and all other products built with our internal interface library.

Achieving the right contrast with color is challenging, especially because color is incredibly subjective and has a big effect on the aesthetics of a product. We wanted to create a color system with hand-picked, vibrant colors that also met standards for accessibility and contrast.

Read more

On Tuesday, we held our annual conference in San Francisco where we share our roadmap and directly get feedback from our customers. Thanks to those of you who joined us in SF or on the livestream!

We’ve invested significantly in our Global Payments and Treasury Network and our software applications in the past year, shipping more than 250 new features.

A few highlights:

• Stripe Capital provides fast, flexible financing for you to grow your business.
• Stripe Corporate Card is the easiest way for everyone in your company to handle expenses.
• Stripe is now available in 8 new European countries—Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Greece, and Portugal.
• U.S. businesses can send payouts to 45 countries (more coming soon).
• Connect Express has expanded support to 28 additional countries.
• Instant Payouts are rolling out to U.S. businesses. We’re also speeding up payouts outside the U.S. soon.
• New financial reports and a beta of revenue recognition for Stripe Billing to help you close your books faster.
• Stripe CLI lets you interact with many parts of the Stripe API, debug your code with live logs, and receive webhook events.

We’re grateful to partner with you and to see what experiences you’ll create. I’m excited to hear your feedback on what we should build next—no request is too small.

Stripe is now generally available for businesses in eight additional European countries. Businesses in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Greece, and Portugal can now sign up and use the full Stripe stack.

Since Stripe launched in 2011, tens of thousands of businesses across Europe have asked us to expand Stripe to their countries. This isn’t surprising by any means—Europe has one of the highest densities of software engineers in the world and thriving startup ecosystems are growing across the region. (As a company looking to grow the GDP of the internet, we’re also ardent fans of innovative initiatives like Estonia’s e-residency programs.)

With today’s launch, we want to help thousands more entrepreneurs and companies in Europe grow and scale their online businesses. As just a couple of examples of the breadth of businesses building on Stripe already: Andcards from Poland uses Stripe to automatically bill their customers across the world in local currencies; Click & Grow from Estonia uses Stripe to sell a smart indoor garden to a global customer base. Thanks to the hundreds of companies that helped us shape our product during our beta.

Earlier this year, we announced that we’d be taking a different approach to global engineering. Building global engineering hubs closer to our regional users helps us stay in closer sync with our customers’ needs and move faster. Today’s launch was built almost entirely by our engineering teams in Europe—everything from integrating with new financial partners to adding support for local legal entity types to handling non-Latin characters. If you’re interested in working with us to help build economic infrastructure, we’re hiring for many roles in Europe and beyond.

You can get started with Stripe by just creating an account. If you have any feedback, please let us know!