We set out to build a globe that inspires a sense of awe, invites people to explore, and conceals details for discovery. Along the way, we evaluated existing tools, designed our own solution, solved four interesting technical challenges, and improved the way we collaborate. Here’s what we learned.
Racism is antithetical to Stripe’s mission. Our founding purpose is the broader, fairer distribution of opportunity—opportunity accessible to and inclusive of everyone, everywhere. While no person’s or company’s statement will change society by itself, that limitation shouldn’t paralyze. Social change requires coordinated, broad participation.
Stripe Billing is already the fastest way for businesses to set up subscriptions or invoices. The customer portal makes it even easier to create a great experience for your customers while minimizing engineering investment.
Last May, Stripe launched our remote engineering hub, a virtual office coequal with our physical engineering offices in San Francisco, Seattle, Dublin, and Singapore. It’s now the backbone of a new working model for the whole company. Here is what we’ve learned.
Stripe is now generally available in the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta. This means Stripe can now support businesses in 39 countries (29 in Europe) with our complete payments platform, enabling them to sell to customers around the globe.
To mitigate the threat of climate change, the majority of climate models agree that the world will need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on the scale of approximately 6 gigatons of CO2 per year by 2050. That’s roughly the equivalent of the United States’ annual emissions.
Last year, Stripe announced our Negative Emissions Commitment, pledging at least $1M per year to pay, at any price, for the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and its sequestration in secure long-term storage. We’ve since built a small team within Stripe to focus on creating a market for carbon removal by being an early customer for promising carbon removal technologies.
Stripe Billing is designed to be the fastest way for ambitious businesses to set up recurring subscriptions or one-off invoices. Companies such as Slack, The Atlantic, Notion, and Postmates use Billing so they can focus their engineering resources on their core business instead of building and maintaining a subscription-management system. And they get key advantages because Billing is deeply integrated into the Stripe payments stack—for example, our customers recovered 41% of failed payments last year through automatic card updates, smart retries, and other included capabilities.
Millions of businesses rely on Stripe to accept payments safely. Our goal is to help those businesses maximize payments from legitimate customers, while minimizing their losses to fraud. Online fraud causes unnecessary losses for most online businesses; for some, it can be so expensive that it threatens their viability.
Stripe Issuing is an API that allows you to create and control virtual and physical cards. Today, we’re opening access to all businesses in the US, so you can sign up and start creating cards instantly. We built Issuing to help businesses manage how funds get spent. Companies like Zipcar want to help renters fill up the gas tank without using their personal cards. Companies like Postmates want to help couriers pay for orders without allowing unapproved purchases. These businesses couldn’t just hand out corporate expense cards—they needed to create their own cards.
Stripe enables businesses in many countries worldwide to onboard easily so they can accept payments as quickly as possible. Stripe’s scale makes our platform a common target for payments fraud and cybercrime, so we’ve built a deep understanding of the patterns bad actors use. We take these threats seriously because they harm both our users and our ecosystem; every fraudulent transaction we circumvent keeps anyone impacted from having a bad day.
In April 2017, Stripe launched Increment, a quarterly print and digital magazine about how teams build and operate software systems at scale. Its mission? To act as a dependable resource, offering stories, insights, and advice to inspire and support developers—with valuable learnings from some of the tech industry’s most effective software teams.
Building and testing a Stripe integration can require frequent switching between the terminal, your code editor, and the Dashboard. Today, we’re excited to launch the Stripe command-line interface (CLI). It lets you interact with Stripe right from the terminal and makes it easier to build, test, and manage your integration.
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.
Today, we’re happy to officially launch Stripe in Malaysia. Businesses all across the country can now easily accept and manage payments, and access the full Stripe stack including Billing, Connect, Radar and Sigma.
Stripe launched in Singapore in 2016. Since then, we’ve seen strong traction, and are proud to work with some of the fastest-growing companies in the region, including Grab, Mobike, and Carousell. Today, we’re increasing our investment: we’re very excited to announce that Singapore is joining Seattle, Dublin, and San Francisco to become Stripe’s fourth global engineering hub.
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.
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.
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.
Logging is one of the oldest and most ubiquitous patterns in computing. We’ve found using a slight augmentation to traditional logging immensely useful at Stripe—an idea that we call canonical log lines. It’s 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.
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.