Historically, we’ve released new API features as soon as they’re ready for production—regardless of whether they’re backwards-compatible or not. While this allowed us to give you access to the newest features right away, you also told us that it would be easier to plan your engineering roadmap if you knew when we were going to make updates to our API.

We’ve heard your feedback. We’re introducing a new release cadence and versioning system for all API endpoints that combines twice-yearly major updates¹ with monthly feature enhancements. This set release schedule gives you the predictability and clarity that you need to better plan your engineering cycles.

We’re also releasing the first API version—Acacia—under this new model. Here’s how it works:

• Each semiannual major release—like Acacia—includes breaking changes and is named after a plant (after all, APIs are growing systems that we should carefully tend to and maintain).
• Each monthly release adds new features without breaking changes. Monthly releases continue to use the same name as the last major release to denote that it’s safe to upgrade without needing to adopt any breaking changes.

• Every release includes a new SDK for each supported language and up-to-date documentation describing the latest features and how to upgrade. While Stripe’s SDKs for each language will continue to use semantic versioning, each SDK version is directly associated with an API release, ensuring that you can effectively manage updates.

A new and improved developer changelog

To help you understand what’s changing in each new API version (and why), we’ve also redesigned our developer changelog. While the previous version of our changelog listed all updates to the Stripe API, you asked for more help understanding which changes apply to your specific API version.

Our new changelog solves this, allowing you to:

• Get a clear explanation for each major release that describes the new features and platform updates
• Understand how changes impact your integration with concise summaries of API, SDK, and platform updates
• Easily adopt breaking changes and upgrade to newer API versions with step-by-step upgrade guidance
• Filter and search for relevant updates

We’ve also included this information for past API versions, so you can more easily upgrade from older versions to the latest release.

Making it easier to build on Stripe

Our new release schedule and updated changelog allow you to operate more efficiently as an engineering team by adopting API changes faster and with more confidence. As always, we welcome your feedback on Stripe Insiders and look forward to seeing what you build with Stripe. 

To explore this new release, visit our new changelog.