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.

We provide our risk analysts with automated tools to make informed decisions while sifting legitimate users from potentially fraudulent accounts. One of the most useful tools we’ve developed uses machine learning to identify similar clusters of accounts created by fraudsters trying to scale their operations. Many of these attempts are easy to detect and we can reverse engineer the fingerprints they leave behind to shut them down in real-time. In turn, this allows our analysts to spend more time on sophisticated cases that have the potential to do more harm to our users.

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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.

As a software company building economic infrastructure, creating a physical print magazine was, perhaps, a non-obvious choice. But two and a half years in, we’ve published 11 issues and over 100 stories, representing the work of many dozens of editorial contributors and illustrators. We’ve shared Nadia Eghbal’s take on future expectations for open-source, Alvaro Videla’s analogy of programming as translation, Glenn Fleishman’s exploration of COBOL’s many-decade journey, and Juan Pablo Buriticá and Katie Womersley’s guide to distributed engineering teams. We’ve talked about cloud capacity planning, testing in production, on-call best practices, and mental health. And while we had full-color copies on hand—on actual, touchable paper—at conferences and events we attended, Increment in print was not yet for sale.

Our readers have regularly asked us when we would make it easier to get print copies of Increment. Today, we’re excited to share that print subscriptions are here. (You can purchase issues from our complete back catalog, too.)

We’re thankful for the readers and community—you are the reason we publish Increment. If you have ideas for future issues or authors we should feature, please reach out—we’d love to hear from you. Happy reading.

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.

To start, the CLI will let you test webhooks, tail real-time API logs, and create or update API objects. Here’s a preview of some of the features:

Simplify webhook setup and testing

Stripe sends a variety of webhooks, which let you listen and respond to specific events programmatically. Run stripe listen with the CLI to forward webhooks to your local web server during development—no third-party tunneling tools required. You can also trigger and test specific webhook events with stripe trigger.

Debug faster with real-time logs

While integrating, it can be useful to look at logs to fix any issues. You can now use stripe logs tail to stream API request logs in real time in the terminal in addition to viewing these logs from the Dashboard. Quickly inspect parameters or JSON responses and debug errors as they happen.

Speed up common tasks and workflows

You can now create, retrieve, update, or delete any Stripe object directly from the CLI in both test and live mode. For example, you can use stripe customers create and specify parameters for properties inline.

Since you can pipe results into other commands, this can be a simple and powerful way to automate tasks. Here’s an example:

$ stripe subscriptions list \
    --live \
    --status past_due \
    --expand data.customer | \
  jq -r ".data[] | [.customer.name, .customer.email] | @csv"

The above command uses the CLI to list live subscriptions that are past due, pipes the JSON response to jq to extract the customer name and email, and exports the data in CSV format.

To see a full list of supported commands, run stripe help or visit the docs to learn more.

Getting started

The Stripe CLI natively supports macOS, Windows, and Linux. You can also pull our Docker image to use in automated testing or a continuous integration setup.

We’re just getting started and we’ll be adding a lot more features to the CLI. If you have feedback or feature requests, join the conversation on GitHub. You can also run stripe feedback to share your ideas for which use cases we should tackle next.

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. Text and icon colors now reliably have legible contrast throughout the Stripe Dashboard and all other products built with our internal interface library.

Achieving the right contrast with color is challenging, especially because color is incredibly subjective and has a big effect on the aesthetics of a product. We wanted to create a color system with hand-picked, vibrant colors that also met standards for accessibility and contrast.

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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.

A few highlights:

• Stripe Capital provides fast, flexible financing for you to grow your business.
• Stripe Corporate Card is the easiest way for everyone in your company to handle expenses.
• Stripe is now available in 8 new European countries—Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Greece, and Portugal.
• U.S. businesses can send payouts to 45 countries (more coming soon).
• Connect Express has expanded support to 28 additional countries.
• Instant Payouts are rolling out to U.S. businesses. We’re also speeding up payouts outside the U.S. soon.
• New financial reports and a beta of revenue recognition for Stripe Billing to help you close your books faster.
• Stripe CLI lets you interact with many parts of the Stripe API, debug your code with live logs, and receive webhook events.

We’re grateful to partner with you and to see what experiences you’ll create. I’m excited to hear your feedback on what we should build next—no request is too small.