We’ve heard from many Stripe Atlas entrepreneurs that getting business taxes right is painful. It’s hard to know what taxes you owe, good accountants are expensive and hard to find, and fixing mistakes is even more expensive. All of this takes time away from building your product and company.
We built a distributed cron job scheduling system on top of Kubernetes, an exciting new platform for container orchestration. In this post, we’ll explain why we chose to build on top of Kubernetes, how we integrated Kubernetes into our existing infrastructure, our approach to building confidence in (and improving) our Kubernetes’ cluster’s reliability, and the abstractions we’ve built on top of Kubernetes.
We built Sigma to help businesses quickly analyze their Stripe data and get to insights faster. Today, we’re adding the ability for Connect platforms to query data about their connected accounts as well.
We’ve consistently heard from platforms that onboarding sellers is still one of the hardest challenges they face. Earlier this year, we launched Express accounts for Connect platforms to provide you a quick and easy way to onboard individuals as sellers and service providers while maintaining control over the look and feel of the experience. Express platforms have already onboarded thousands of individuals across industries ranging from childcare to streetwear. Starting today, you can also onboard businesses on your platform with Express.
Today, we’re starting an invite-only beta for Stripe in India with a small group of companies. These businesses will help us test our platform in the Indian market and provide feedback on features that we’ll need to build to support all Indian businesses looking to accept online payments and run their companies on Stripe.
When we launched Stripe Radar to help you prevent payment fraud, we built in the ability to manually review suspicious payments. Suspicious payments are flagged for review either by Radar’s machine learning systems or when they trigger a custom rule set by your business.
Stripe Sigma helps you analyze your Stripe data with industry-standard SQL, making it easier to get powerful real-time insights into your business data. Today, we’re adding a couple more useful features in response to requests we’ve heard.
Today, we’re launching two additional features to improve the security of your Stripe account: an option to use hardware tokens for two-step authentication and the ability to create API keys with restricted access and granular permissions.
At Stripe, we regularly contribute to open-source projects and rely on open-source software for developing many different parts of our stack. Stripe supported the development of Hypothesis, an open-source testing library for Python created by David MacIver. Hypothesis provides effective tooling for testing code for machine learning, a domain in which testing and correctness are notoriously difficult.
Today we’re officially launching Stripe in New Zealand!
Businesses in New Zealand can now sign up instantly and start accepting payments in minutes with 135+ currencies from customers around the world. From Connect and Billing to Radar and Sigma, New Zealand businesses can now use the full Stripe stack to start and scale global companies.
Today, we’re excited to add .NET to our officially supported languages (alongside Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, Node, and Go). Going forward, we’ll regularly be updating the Stripe .NET library to support our latest products and features.
When it comes to APIs, change isn’t popular. While software developers are used to iterating quickly and often, API developers lose that flexibility as soon as even one user starts consuming their interface. Many of us are familiar with how the Unix operating system evolved. In 1994, <em>The Unix-Haters Handbook</em> was published containing a long list of missives about the software---everything from overly-cryptic command names that were optimized for Teletype machines, to irreversible file deletion, to unintuitive programs with far too many options. Over twenty years later, an overwhelming majority of these complaints are still valid even across the dozens of modern derivatives. Unix had become so widely used that changing its behavior would have challenging implications. For better or worse, it established a contract with its users that defined how Unix interfaces behave.
We’re excited to announce that Stripe has acquired Payable to help make it easier for platforms and marketplaces on Stripe Connect to meet their tax reporting obligations worldwide.
Startups are a curious alchemy of people, knowledge, money, and technology. Access to these building blocks has historically been grossly uneven, but is improving over time. Open-source software and cloud services have made the core infrastructure of technology companies easier and cheaper to build than ever before. The internet has collected and distributed a growing body of practice for the practical know-how of how to build and scale companies.
We just released version 11.0 of our iOS SDK, which adds a few new features: simpler integration, sources support, card scanning, city and state auto-fill, and customer pre-fetching.
We recently released a new and improved version of Connect, our suite of tools designed for platforms and marketplaces. Stripe’s design team works hard to create unique landing pages that tell a story for our major products. For this release, we designed Connect’s landing page to reflect its intricate, cutting-edge capabilities while keeping things light and simple on the surface.
In this blog post, we’ll describe how we used several next-generation web technologies to bring Connect to life, and walk through some of the finer technical details (and excitement!) on our front-end journey.
Managing payments for marketplaces and platforms is harder than for most other businesses: not only do these businesses have to accept money from customers, but they also need to handle funds and pay out to third parties. Adding further complication, paying out money means doing things like checking recipient IDs, reporting taxable income, and a whole host of new tasks.
Code is central to Stripe: we build APIs, software tools, and infrastructure that are in turn used by other software engineering-driven businesses. And of course code is also central—by definition—at other software companies.
Today, we’re updating our support for team roles in the Dashboard: we’ve made what’s there clearer and we’re also adding two new roles. If you haven't seen this part of the Dashboard before, we support you giving as many team members as you like access to your Stripe account. When we first added teams and roles to Stripe, we only provided three access levels: administrator, read and write, and read-only. We’ve heard feedback that different job functions need a more distinct set of permissions when accessing Stripe accounts.
As software becomes more important in the world, the practice and art of software is becoming more important too. A lot has been written about how individual engineers can be more effective. We've noticed that much less has been written about how software engineering teams can be more effective.