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Introducing the Stripe Partner Program

Vicki Lin on July 31, 2018

Today, we’re launching the Stripe Partner Program to amplify and help grow our platform, plugin, and extension partners.

Thousands of companies like Shopify, DocuSign, WooCommerce, and Xero work with Stripe to let businesses and individuals accept payments directly within their products. Other companies, like Segment or Avalara, build extensions that add new features and capabilities to the Stripe platform.

Stripe’s APIs and operational infrastructure help partners bring businesses online and enable new types of businesses. We help handle everything related to payments, including global compliance, 24x7 payments support, and supporting the latest features.

We’ve been thrilled to see the new payment experiences that our partners have built and we’ve designed our program to enable them to build and launch faster, reach more customers, and operate at scale.

Registering for the Stripe Partner Program is free. Partners get access to documentation and best practices collected from across the Stripe network to help them optimize their integration and launch quickly and easily.

Partners can also choose to become a Stripe Verified Partner to get additional benefits—from the ability to escalate support requests on behalf of their customers to a listing in our curated partners gallery to reach Stripe businesses. (Learn more about the verification process and pricing.)

This is just the start. We’re excited to build more products and resources for our partners in the future. If you have any questions, feedback, or are considering building an integration, please get in touch!

Let’s grow the internet economy together. Become a partner

July 31, 2018

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24x7 phone and chat support

Jonathan Kuhn on July 10, 2018

Today, we’re excited to share that we’re launching free 24x7 phone and chat support for all Stripe users. In addition to the email support we already offer, you’ll now be able to reach us via phone or chat from support.stripe.com after logging in.

Providing great support at scale is complex. Stripe now serves millions of businesses worldwide. To provide responsive support over phone, chat, and email, we’ve invested in every aspect of how we serve our users over the past few years—from building infrastructure and tooling to hiring teammates across 9 offices and all timezones. Our priority is getting you the right answer no matter how you choose to contact us and we’re continuously working to make every support interaction better.

We also treat support as a learning engine. We’ve built internal systems that turn standard support metrics into detailed insights that help with everything from routing and categorizing questions more efficiently to providing the right contextual information. Many of the improvements our engineering teams make to Stripe’s products and features stem from reading the syntheses of support issues.

We hope these additional ways to reach the Stripe team help you and your business. Phone and chat support will be available in English to start. Email support will continue to be available in English, German, French, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. If you have a technical question, you’re also welcome to hop into the #stripe IRC channel on freenode.

We rely on your feedback to improve our products and features, so please let us know how we can better support you.

Get help with a question or give us feedback.
Chat with us Talk to us

July 10, 2018

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Effectively using AWS Reserved Instances

Ryan Lopopolo on June 26, 2018 in Engineering

Stripe uses Amazon Web Services to power our infrastructure. With AWS, we can dynamically scale our fleet of servers in real-time. This elasticity enables us to reliably serve a rapidly growing user base and scale along with their businesses. We use AWS Reserved Instances, which allow us to predictably forecast our cloud spend given a dynamic fleet with rapidly changing compute requirements.

One of the biggest problems in cloud computing is capacity planning: the ability to forecast your compute power requirements and manage the budget allocated to AWS servers. At Stripe, we started by solely using reserved instances to manage pricing for individual instances, but today we can dynamically and reliably understand costs as our fleet changes over time. Reserved instances allow us to make cost-effective decisions through careful resource management. We’ve developed an easy-to-use framework for automating our purchase decisions, which we’ll outline in this post.

Read more

June 26, 2018

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Streamlining workflows with the new Connect Dashboard

Hamish Kerr on June 14, 2018

Over the next few weeks, we’re rolling out new features in the Dashboard to help marketplaces and platforms efficiently run their business on Stripe Connect. With these improvements, you can send funds to your sellers or service providers (“connected accounts”), see detailed breakdowns of an account’s recent activity, and quickly update account information directly in the Connect portion of the Dashboard.

Managing your platform’s day-to-day operations can be cumbersome for your finance, support, and operations teams—especially as you scale to thousands of connected accounts and beyond. Early beta users tell us that these new insights and tools allow their teams to field issues more effectively and independently, saving them and their engineering teams hours every month.

Send transfers and payouts from the Dashboard

Regardless of your Connect account type—Standard, Express, or Custom—you can now move funds to your connected accounts straight from the Dashboard instead of creating a transfer through the API. If you’re a Connect Custom or Express user, you can also create payouts. By enabling transfers and payouts in the Dashboard, you can scale your user support and payouts management, without requiring your engineering team to build custom tools.

Edit account details with ease

We’ve also made changes that streamline common workflows. Previously, viewing and updating settings for your connected accounts was a relatively cumbersome process. It’s now possible to handle these tasks from your Dashboard. All platforms can inspect recent payment or payout activity and view specific account balances, while Custom and Express platforms can also easily update payout schedules for their connected accounts. Custom platforms can also update identity information and banking details.

Easy access to more information about connected accounts

We’ve also updated the account page to provide more insight into your connected accounts.

Account Header

The new header surfaces more information about the account at a glance. You can now quickly see the account’s balance, lifetime volume, and whether or not it has payments and payouts enabled.

Balance

The new ‘Balance’ section provides a summary of how much money the connected account has in its Stripe account balance. Additionally, it’s possible for administrators to send funds to connected accounts in seconds.

Activity

The new ‘Activity’ section improves upon the old ‘Transfers’ section and now lists the recent payments, transfers, payouts, and collected fees associated with a connected account.

Metadata Search

We’ve also added the ability to search for connected accounts by metadata so that you can find what you need faster, with relevant keywords.

Clear verification statuses for Connect Custom Accounts

In the new Dashboard, we’ve made the verification explanations better and clearer. If one of your connected accounts had its payouts paused, this will now be highlighted in red alongside a remediation suggestion. These updates help Connect Custom platforms proactively resolve verification issues.

These updates are the first of many improvements coming to the Dashboard that will help your team run more efficiently. The updated Dashboard is rolling out to all Connect platforms in each of Stripe’s 25 supported countries in the next few weeks.

You can learn more about the updates in our documentation or check out our guide to getting started.

Have questions or want to get early access? Get in touch.

June 14, 2018

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Payments updates

Eduardo Serrano on June 4, 2018

We’ve added a number of new features to Stripe Payments over the last few months that might be useful for your business:

NewMore European payment methods

U.S. and European Stripe businesses can now reach more customers worldwide by supporting popular European payment methods like Bancontact, Giropay, iDEAL, Sofort, SEPA Direct Debits, EPS, and P24.

NewIBAN support in Stripe Elements

We’ve added IBAN support to Stripe Elements. U.S. and European businesses can now easily collect international bank account numbers to create SEPA Direct Debit sources or bank account tokens. The IBAN Element reduces user error with instant client-side formatting and validation of IBANs from all SEPA countries.

NewFaster iDEAL flows with Stripe Elements

Customers in the Netherlands can now pick their bank before starting the iDEAL payment flow using Stripe Elements. Instead of having to visit an intermediate redirect page, they can now immediately get to their bank’s website to complete the payment.

NewChina UnionPay cards

Customers can use China UnionPay credit cards to pay U.S. Stripe businesses—there’s no additional integration required.

NewMicrosoft Pay

We’ve added support for Microsoft Pay to help customers using the Microsoft Edge browser checkout faster. Our single integration now supports Apple Pay, Google Pay, Microsoft Pay, and the Payment Request API—a browser standard that lets customers quickly enter payment info they’ve stored in their browser.

UpdateMastercard Series 2 cards

Stripe supports all Mastercard cards, including the newest cards that start with 2 (known as Series 2 BINS). In case you’ve previously built custom logic to reject some cards, please verify you’re not excluding these customers.

We hope that these new features will help your business. If you’re new to Stripe, you can explore all of our payments features or see a demo of them in action.

If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know!

June 4, 2018

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Stripe Atlas for LLCs

Patrick McKenzie on April 30, 2018

Today, we’re adding support for creating a limited liability company (LLC) with Stripe Atlas. It’s been one of the most requested features from our users, and we’re excited to make it possible.

LLCs and C Corporations

We started Stripe Atlas as an easy way to create a Delaware C Corporation. They are the entity of choice for many investor-backed technology companies, but they’re not for everyone. LLCs, on the other hand, are used by many small teams, bootstrapped businesses, and side projects seeking a more flexible start.

Startups are continuous creation machines, running experiments and rearchitecting themselves on the fly. Legal choices often force startups to predict the future: is this a side project or the next Google? We think that some founders stop because they aren’t certain yet. So we sought to give founders more options to just get started.

The Stripe Atlas LLC

Founders can now use Stripe Atlas to form an LLC in days. The Stripe Atlas LLC has the features common to LLCs: limited liability for founders and the flexibility to be taxed as an individual. But LLCs are used for everything from holding companies to restaurants, and we wanted the Stripe Atlas LLC templates to help meet the needs of technology startups. Orrick designed the Stripe Atlas legal documents to match the ways founders tell us they want to work. For example, the Stripe Atlas LLC:

  • Enables founders to assign relevant IP to the company at formation, formalizing ownership of key technology.
  • Is designed to make conversion to a C Corporation as simple as possible. (We can connect Stripe Atlas users to a lawyer to manage the conversion process with discounted, flat-rate packages).
  • Provides a simplified process for adding members after formation.
  • Is organized in Delaware, the jurisdiction of choice for many new LLCs.

You can read more about the Stripe Atlas LLC—and tradeoffs between an LLC and C Corporation—in this guide.

Forming an LLC through Stripe Atlas will cost the same as a C Corporation: $500 gets you a new entity, tax ID, U.S. business bank account, Stripe account, access to expert tax and legal advice from our partners, tools for handling taxes, and credits with a number of services. You’ll also join the Stripe Atlas Community, where you can connect with other founders, learn from experts, and get practical advice. We’re starting in beta, and folks who request an invite will hear back within a couple weeks.

Over the last two years, thousands of founders from over 130 countries—ranging from side projects to startups funded by Y Combinator—have used Stripe Atlas. We’ve been delighted by their progress, and can’t wait to see what you build.

Form an LLC with Stripe Atlas Request an invite

April 30, 2018

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Stripe Home

Michael Schade on April 19, 2018

At Stripe, we’ve always been intentional about how we communicate, share information, and stay connected. Back when Stripe was smaller, it was easy for this to happen automatically. But by the time we hit around 150 people, it became hard to know everyone’s name. So at a company hackathon, a few Stripes created People, a directory to help Stripes meet and get to really know each other.

People focused on connecting individuals across the company: Stripes could set their own bios, create networks around common interests, and generally experiment with new ways to express who they are. People also gave us our first concept of a people API, which set the stage for automating our notification systems and made it quick to roll out new people-oriented features (like seating charts!).

We’ve since turned People turned into a full-fledged product called Home, weaving both how we know one another and share information beyond email into the same product. Used by 99% of Stripes in the last month, Home is the source of truth for who we are, what we’re doing, and why—and a platform for enabling individuals and helping them get to know one another.

Here’s a quick tour through a few Home highlights:

People worldwide

The people at Stripe are what bring and keep so many of us here, so we’ve made it easy to meet folks across the company. In the spirit of the original People, new Stripes are front and center on Home along with their own quick video introductions, a flipbook through existing Stripes (can you get their name right?), and activities happening around the company (ranging from classes we host to events for our users).

Home was also designed to encourage Stripes to get to know each person beyond their team and the projects they’re working on. We’ve found that building connections across the company makes it easier for us to share, learn from fresh perspectives and build a sense of belonging early on. Everyone has their own personal page that describes how to get ahold of them for work, where they work, and any quick background they’d like to share.

Home can’t paint the complete picture of the person behind the page, but it helps break the ice. Outside Home, we encourage people to meet in person—one of our more structured approaches involves a chat bot that helps schedule lunches among Stripes who are least likely to know each other (more than 5,000 lunches have been facilitated since it was set up!).

Multiple teams, one company

We don’t view teams as information silos or hard boundaries. Instead, we’ve designed teams to empower a group of individuals to take end-to-end ownership over an area and act autonomously toward their goals, while sharing lessons with the rest of Stripe. Helping teams share their knowledge to the company makes it easier for individuals at Stripe to find context that will both guide them in their work and help them learn above and beyond their role.

But with dozens of teams at Stripe, it’s tough to keep track of every area. To help, we built the team index as a central place to find any team at Stripe. Home randomly features teams and the individuals within them at the top to help keep Stripes aware. Individual team pages are like the people pages: they provide a common interface for getting ahold of the team, finding useful resources the team has shared, and even watching video introductions for the entire group at once. (We now have ten offices globally and built similar pages for those at a recent hackathon.)

Knowledge sharing

Individual Stripes collaborate—a lot. Last year we created more than 20,000 documents, ranging from email drafts to project proposals to canonical documentation relied on across the entire company.

Our search system lets Stripe look across documents, people, teams, and even API models, with live filters to help narrow the corpus quickly. The search interface is completely API-driven with modular content indexers underneath, so it’s easy to add new types of content to the same interface we use to find everything else. (API models were a recent addition.)

We still have a lot to do along these lines. Search satisfies the curious who know roughly what they’re looking for. Next up, we’d like to incorporate our canonical documentation into a structure that not only helps people browse and keep up with changes, but also helps Stripes find information they wouldn’t go hunting for on their own that would nevertheless benefit them (like lessons from another team’s retrospective).


Under the hood, Home is built on the same technology as our user-facing products (such as the Dashboard) because we wanted to make it easy to move between developing user-facing and internally-facing products. This has made Home a favorite for new Stripes’ spin-up projects and a popular go-to for Hackathon projects. The search feature described was built by a new class of Stripes as their very first project and office pages were built at our most recent hackathon.

Home is such an important part of how we work together and stay connected; it remains a work in progress along with Stripe as a whole. We’re still figuring out how to balance transparency with information overload, serendipity with curated content, and crisp interfaces and team boundaries with the actual human part that makes the company what it is. Our next projects are all about evolving knowledge discovery: from team pages that weave the individuals, metrics, and our users together to a better way to browse and publish information.

Interested in working on Home? Join Stripe. View Openings

April 19, 2018

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Improved fraud prevention with Radar 2.0

Eeke de Milliano on April 18, 2018

We launched Radar in 2016 to help protect our users from fraud. We’ve blocked billions of dollars in fraud across the Stripe network for companies of all sizes—from startups like Slice and WeSwap to larger companies like Fitbit and OpenTable. Since launch, we’ve continuously invested in our suite of fraud prevention tools, and today, we’re excited to launch the result of those efforts.

The next generation of machine learning

As of today, we’ve rebuilt almost every component of our fraud detection stack to dramatically improve performance. In early testing, the upgraded machine learning models helped reduce fraud by over 25% compared to previous models, without increasing the false positive rate.

  • Hundreds of new signals for improved accuracy: We’ve added new signals to better distinguish fraudsters from legitimate customers, including certain data from buyer patterns that are highly predictive of fraud. Some signals now use new, high-throughput data infrastructure to process hundreds of billions of historical events. (Even if a card is new to your business, there’s an 89% chance it’s been seen before on the Stripe network.)
  • Nightly model training: Fraud evolves and changes rapidly. Radar can now adapt even faster by training and evaluating new machine learning models daily.
  • Algorithmic changes for better recall and precision: We’ve optimized our machine learning algorithms in hundreds of ways—from boosting the performance of our decision trees to tweaking the minutiae of how we handle class imbalance, missing values, and more.
  • Custom models for your business to maximize performance: Radar is constantly evaluating how to balance patterns from across the Stripe network with patterns that are unique to your business. Radar now trains and evaluates multiple models daily and determines which one achieves the best performance for you.

“Radar cut our fraud rates by over 70% without any configuration, saving our pizzerias thousands of dollars every month and allowing us to focus on delivering the best local pizza experience possible.”
— Finn Borge, Product Manager at Slice

Introducing Radar for Fraud Teams

While most Stripe businesses can rely entirely on Radar’s automated fraud protection, it makes sense for some companies with more fraud risk to invest more deeply. We’ve now made that as easy and powerful as possible on Stripe. We’ve honed features to be even more useful to fraud professionals, built new features, and packaged them all together in a new bundle called Radar for Fraud Teams.

UpdateOptimized reviews to spot fraud faster

When reviewing payments, we now show relevant info for faster and more accurate reviews. You can see data related to the device used, compare the geolocated IP address and the credit card address, or see whether the purchase pattern is anomalous compared to typical legitimate payments for your business.

UpdateRelated payments for more accurate reviews

We now help you evaluate payments holistically rather than in isolation by surfacing previous related payments your business has processed that match certain attributes like email address, IP address, or card number.

UpdateCustom rules with real-time feedback

When you create a rule, Stripe will use your historical data to show how that rule would have impacted real transactions your business has seen. We’ve added dozens of new properties you can use in rules to give your teams even more fine-grained levers.

NewCustom risk thresholds

Radar for Fraud Teams surfaces a numerical risk score (0–100) for every payment. Depending on your business’s appetite for fraud, you can tweak the threshold at which to block payments to maximize revenue.

NewBlock and allow lists

Fraud teams now have an easy way to create and maintain lists of attributes—card numbers, emails, IP addresses, and more—that you want to consistently block or allow.

NewRich analytics on fraud performance

Get a snapshot that helps focus your fraud team. The new overview highlights dispute trends, the effectiveness of reviewing flagged payments, and the impact of rules you’ve written for your business.

Radar for Fraud Teams has already made fraud management easier and more effective for beta users at Watsi, Fitbit, Restocks, Patreon, and more.

“The related payments feature helped our fraud team quickly spot a nuanced fraud ring and avoid significant potential loss. It’s been a great asset in our fraud detection arsenal.”
— Alison Cleggett, Head of Risk and Compliance at WeSwap

Get early access

We’re gradually rolling out the upgraded machine learning models to all users over the next few weeks. If you’d like, you can also activate the models today. Activating early requires that your Stripe integration follows a few basic best practices. Most users already follow these best practices and won’t need to make any changes to get early access—you can check your integration by logging in to the Dashboard.

Radar for Fraud Teams is also available starting today as an optional add-on. If you’re already using any of features included in Radar for Fraud Teams (like rules or reviews), there are no changes to your pricing—the machine learning updates and all new Radar for Fraud Teams features are included at no extra cost for your account.

We’re constantly updating and improving Radar to help Stripe businesses fight fraud. If you have any questions or feedback, we’d love to hear from you!

Fight fraud with the strength of the Stripe network. Explore Radar

April 18, 2018