Stripe has offered subscription billing functionality from day 1. From day 2, we’ve been hearing requests to support more than one active subscription per customer. Much like we did with cards last July, you can now (finally!) create, retrieve, list, update, and delete subscriptions as first-class API resources on customers:

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/customers/cus_3R12DmsmM9/subscriptions \
  -u sk_test_mkGsLqEW6SLnZa487HYfJVLf: \
  -d plan=extra_bandwidth_package

Subscriptions can also be managed from the dashboard and there’s full support for per-subscription invoices, invoice items, and discounts.

As with a lot of what we launch, this has been in the works for a while, and many early testers provided great feedback—thanks to all of you, and especially to Michael Belfrage from Udacity. (If you’d like to test out their integration, just enroll in multiple Udacity courses. Personally, I recommend CS101 and CS271.)

Our API documentation has been updated to reflect these changes, but if you’re an existing user looking to see exactly what’s new, this overview might be useful.

Lastly, if you’re interested in testing out new functionality like this in the future, you may find it useful to subscribe to our api-discuss mailing list. (Fortunately, the list also supports multiple subscriptions.) And if you have any feedback, please let me know!

To wrap up Stripe CTF3, we're hosting meetups in San Francisco and London. The architects of CTF3 will go over each of the levels, the motivation behind them, and the ways that participants solved them.

Come by, enjoy the free drinks and snacks, learn to solve the levels, and hang out with fellow participants! People of any technical skill level are welcome.

City:

San Francisco

Date:

Thursday, January 30th, 2014

Time:

7:00 PM

Where:

Stripe HQ
3180 18th Street
San Francisco, CA - 94110

RSVP:

Here

City:

London

Date:

Friday, January 31st, 2014

Time:

6:30 PM

Where:

General Assembly
4th Floor, 9 Back Hill
London EC1R 5EN

RSVP:

Here

Hope to see you there!

Over the last year, we’ve launched betas—and added production users—in Australia, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Spain. We’ve also launched fully in the UK and Ireland.

Up to now, we’ve required an invite if you’re based in one of our beta countries. Starting today, anyone in a beta European country (Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Spain) can sign up without an invite. These countries are still in beta, but we’ve realized that they’re useful to enough people that we should allow anyone to sign up immediately.

We look forward to adding many more countries and continuing to launch across Europe over the course of 2014. As ever, please let us know if you have any feedback!

Accept payments with Stripe. Get started

It's been over a year since our last Capture the Flag competition, and in the meanwhile we've fielded dozens of inquiries about when the next one's coming. The wait is almost over: CTF3 will be here a week from today.

Next Wednesday, starting at 11am San Francisco time (2pm Boston, 7pm London, 6am Melbourne), we'll be launching CTF3.

This time around, we're trying something a bit different. Rather than being about security, CTF3 will focus on distributed systems engineering. You'll learn how to build fault-tolerant, performant software while playing around with a bunch of cool cutting-edge technologies. Like with previous CTFs, our goal is to give you hands-on exposure to interesting engineering problems that you normally only get to read about. If you've been wanting to really grok things like Paxos/Raft, DDOS prevention, distributed search, or Bitcoin (and maybe even bit twiddling), now's your chance.

As always, we're building this CTF for programmers of all skill levels and backgrounds. Even if the above sounds daunting, you should still give it a shot — you might be surprised by what you can accomplish. For those looking for some competition, there will be leaderboards where you can compete against your friends or the CTF community at large.

Want to meet and hack alongside your fellow CTFers in person? While the main gathering will once again be based on IRC (check back for details next week), we'll also be hosting kickoff events in San Francisco, Boston, and London.

Over the next week, the CTF team (Siddarth Chandrasekaran, Andy Brody, Christian Anderson, and I) will be putting the finishing touches on CTF3. See you on the other side!

We’ve noticed that many of you manage more than one Stripe account. Now, instead of creating multiple user accounts with different email addresses, you can add new or existing accounts to one profile and quickly switch between them in the Dashboard (and forget having to remember any additional email and password combos).

You can link existing Stripe accounts, too. Simply invite your other accounts to your team (at any permission level) and you'll be able to seamlessly switch between them. We’ve also updated teams so that you can invite users who already have a Stripe account to your team. Users can belong to multiple teams, and you can quickly switch between these shared accounts as well.

Hopefully this makes managing multiple accounts less annoying. We have lots more de-annoying planned for 2014.

We built Stripe Connect to simplify the payment flow for marketplaces, store builders, and any other platforms that help users get paid. Since our launch last year, we’ve added a couple of new, frequently requested features:

Feedback is always appreciated—we’d love to hear any thoughts on the above, or about anything else you think we should build that’d make Connect better.

Learn more about how Stripe Connect works. Get Started

Come hang out with Alex, Cristina, Dave, Heather, Orla, and Thairu at The Ginger Man in Austin on Thursday night. We'd love to meet you all and buy you a beer!

RSVP via our Meetup event.

Security is one of the biggest considerations in everything we do. In addition to two-factor authentication, we now offer an account activity view, where you can see where and when activity on your account is happening.

The Last Account Activity link in the footer of your dashboard now shows the locations, IP addresses, and times of recent dashboard activity. (As before, you can also view all API requests in the logs section.) If anything looks suspicious or if you simply forgot to sign out of another browser, you can use the Account Activity dialog to terminate any active sessions.

As always, we'd love to hear any feedback!

We’ve long supported a description parameter on Stripe objects like charges and customers—it’s a convenient place to add human-readable info. Since descriptions can be searched and viewed in the dashboard, they generally make Stripe easier to use.

We’ve noticed a lot of users resorting to embedding JSON in the description to annotate Stripe objects with more robust data such as user IDs, product sizing or color, delivery dates, shipping status, tax information, etc.

Now, we’re making it easier to associate structured data with Stripe objects. With our new metadata support, you can directly attach key-value pairs to charges, customers, and most other objects. As with descriptions, this data can be searched and viewed in the dashboard. The API is straightforward:

curl https://api.stripe.com/v1/charges/charge_id \
   -u api_key: \
   -d "metadata[order_id]=132ad31" \
   -d "metadata[shipping_tracking]=1Z9498297793814938"

Metadata helps you store the info that’s most useful for your business, and we hope that it makes it easier to reconcile Stripe objects with your databases and systems. Please let us know what you think!