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!

As part of Stripe’s environmental program, we fully offset our greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing verified carbon offsets. Starting this year, we’re going a step further. In addition to our offset program, we are committing to pay, at any available price, for the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and its sequestration in secure, long-term storage. We’re announcing this commitment to solicit technology partners and to urge other companies to follow suit.

Read more

Logging is one of the oldest and most ubiquitous patterns in computing. Key to gaining insight into problems ranging from basic failures in test environments to the most tangled problems in production, it’s common practice across all software stacks and all types of infrastructure, and has been for decades.

Although logs are powerful and flexible, their sheer volume often makes it impractical to extract insight from them in an expedient way. Relevant information is spread across many individual log lines, and even with the most powerful log processing systems, searching for the right details can be slow and requires intricate query syntax.

We’ve found using a slight augmentation to traditional logging immensely useful at Stripe—an idea that we call canonical log lines. It’s quite a simple technique: in addition to their normal log traces, requests also emit one long log line at the end that includes many of their key characteristics. Having that data colocated in single information-dense lines makes queries and aggregations over it faster to write, and faster to run.

Out of all the tools and techniques we deploy to help get insight into production, canonical log lines in particular have proven to be so useful for added operational visibility and incident response that we’ve put them in almost every service we run—not only are they used in our main API, but there’s one emitted every time a webhook is sent, a credit card is tokenized by our PCI vault, or a page is loaded in the Stripe Dashboard.

Read more

Platforms and marketplaces like RVshare, Lugg, and Qwick use Stripe Connect to onboard and pay their owners, movers, and hospitality professionals. Building a great experience for these people and businesses is key to a platform’s success, and we’ve consistently heard that user onboarding is one of the most difficult challenges platforms face. Based on user feedback and analysis of thousands of Express accounts, we made a number of updates to the Connect onboarding flow that drove a 5.3% average increase in conversion rates.

“With Express, signing up to get paid is really easy for our professionals. The new UI helped us increase onboarding conversion by 17% and improved the overall user experience.”
— Trevor Baker, Director of Product, Qwick

Design improvements

It’s now easier for a platform’s users to fill out the onboarding form. A new progress bar shows users where they are in the process, and bigger form fields make it easier to enter their information on mobile devices. The platform’s brand is also much more visible in the form.

Better user guidance

When a user enters invalid information, they’ll get immediate feedback as they fill out the form. Improvements to field validation help ensure that users submit valid information, while keeping the form user-friendly.

Accessibility upgrades

To provide the best experience for all users, including people who are blind or have low vision or motor impairments, we built the new onboarding flow and reporting dashboard for Express accounts to follow Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Implementing the latest standards in semantic HTML, labeling controls, keyboard navigation, and focus management helps users onboard and manage their payouts with a keyboard and screen reader, without compromising functionality.

Localized flows

Creating a UI that’s tailored to your users’ preferred language and region makes your platform feel like a local business. The onboarding flow has been rebuilt to dynamically update whenever local requirements, laws, or regulations change across the world. This helps platforms quickly expand to new markets outside the US, without having to build new onboarding flows or worry about ongoing maintenance costs or compliance. Express accounts are currently available in the US and Canada, and we’re working on bringing them to more countries soon.

These are the first of many improvements we’re making to the Connect onboarding flow to improve conversion and help platforms save time, money, and development resources. To try the new onboarding flow for Express accounts, check out the demo, or read the docs.

Today we’re excited to make Stripe Terminal available to all users in the US. Terminal is a set of SDKs, APIs, and pre-certified card readers that lets you extend your Stripe integration to accept in-person payments.

Businesses of all types are already using Stripe Terminal to build their in-person payment experiences. Online-first retailers like Warby Parker are using Terminal to build a fully customized in-person checkout. Housecall Pro—a software platform that helps more than 50,000 home service professionals run their businesses—now lets its users manage online bookings and accept in-person payments with Stripe all from one app.

“We created a rich customer experience within our app to accept in-person payments, and it only took us a week of development time.”
— Troy Payne, Head of Engineering at Squire

Unify your payments stack

While we mostly focus on internet businesses, 90% of consumer spending still takes place in person. Businesses that operate both online and in person can find it challenging to create a consistent experience and track customers across channels. Stripe Terminal works seamlessly with your existing Stripe integration to create a single view of customers and sales across channels, which makes reporting and reconciliation easier.

“Terminal eliminated the need to manually record payments, saving us more than two hours each day.”
— Jame Mackson, Lead Engineer at The Wedding Shoppe Inc.

In-person payments, made for developers

With the JavaScript, iOS, and Android SDKs, you can integrate Stripe Terminal into your web, iOS, or Android app in a few days. You can customize every user-facing aspect of your point of sale, including the reader screen. And since Terminal is designed to work with your existing Stripe integration, you can set up in-person payments for subscription businesses using Stripe Billing, or for platforms and marketplaces using Stripe Connect.

Built for SaaS platforms and marketplaces

If you’re doing a wide deployment of in-person payments to third parties, Stripe Terminal is for you. Terminal helps Connect platforms extend their reach by letting connected accounts accept in-person payments from within their platform. Your platform’s users can receive a unified payout for payments accepted online or in person. You can manage your entire fleet of readers and can ship them directly to your connected accounts using your Stripe Dashboard.

“It took us two weeks to integrate Terminal and start offering it to 1,500 of our Pros. They’re now saving money on in-person payments, saving time with automated reconciliation, and getting their money fast with Instant Payouts.”
— Sean Devlin, Senior Director of Special Projects at Housecall Pro

Getting started with Stripe Terminal

Any Stripe user in the US can now start integrating Terminal in three steps:

1. Build your mobile or web app interface for in-person sales
2. Integrate the Terminal SDK to create a connection between your app and the card reader
3. Pair the Stripe card reader with the SDK and take your first in-person payment

We currently support two types of card readers. You can explore which one is right for your business in the docs or get started by ordering from the Dashboard.

We’re still actively working on Terminal and have plenty of improvements in the works. If you have any feedback or questions, we’d love to hear from you. If you’re outside the US, you can get notified when Terminal is available in your country.

One of our favorite things about working at Stripe is that we serve some of the most demanding customers: high-growth, technology businesses, rapidly expanding around the world, inventing new business models along the way. In some ways, that makes our job harder—it’s tough to stay ahead! But in other ways it makes things a lot simpler. As we think about the next few years of Stripe’s development, we don’t have to overcomplicate things. We can set our roadmap directly based on what we hear from our users.

That’s why we started hosting Stripe Sessions a few years ago. It’s an annual event to get together with our users, show them what’s new about Stripe, and hear their feedback. There are always dozens of engineers, product managers, domain experts, and all sorts of other folks from around Stripe there.

Last year was a record year: over a thousand people came to one of our Sessions events in San Francisco, New York, Paris, and London. In between demos and product announcements, we heard from the likes of Airbnb, Shopify, Xero, and Remitly; we received thousands of comment cards; and we asked Stewart Butterfield the tough questions.

This year, we’re excited to more than double the size of Sessions and hear from speakers like Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub. But we also want to make sure it’s always a gathering that lets everyone spend meaningful time together. To that end, we’ll be capping attendance at 1,200 for our main event in San Francisco this year, with additional events to follow in Asia and Europe in the fall.

Thanks to those of you who joined us in SF or on the livestream on September 10. You can now watch the full keynote and breakout talks..