Congrats to the Stripe team. I can't believe it has only been 10 years. I actually had to go check my inbox to see when I started using Stripe and it looks like I received my account notification on 8/30/11!
As other have said here, Stripe was one of those things that just made sense. As a web developer I was tired of jumping through the many hoops of authorize.net or praying that people would complete the purchase path on PayPal. When Stripe came out I (apparently) jumped immediately on it and haven't looked back. It is the only payment solutions provider I offer my clients or use on my own projects.
But the larger impact it has had on me is that it gave me that much more faith in HN as a source of emerging technology solutions. I still comb through batch announcements or check out Show HNs to see what's coming, because I feel like there's a good chance another Stripe is launching today. And it's just as cool that Patrick Collison still is involved in HN. Thanks pc and the rest of you all at Stripe!
I signed up on 9/30/2011 and the registration form was sparse and a little confusing to the point that I ended up emailing support to make sure my account was set up correctly. Got an email back from some dude named John Collison who helped me out. Of course I had no idea who he was at the time but instantly recognized the name several years later when I came across the email again - Gmail had automatically put him in my contacts and I kept thinking it must be a mistake bc there's no way I have John Collison as a personal contact. Stripe has been good to me as a developer over the years and I hope they continue to innovate well into the future.
I still like them because their support folks sent me a t-shirt in, I dunno, maybe 2012, when I posted a slightly-clever workaround on their forums, for some subscription-related functionality they didn't have yet. Fairly cheap way to keep me feeling positive vibes about them, nearly a decade later.
In the early days (2013-14?) of Stripe, I was responsible for maintaining my company's integration.
I still remember how one day there was a message on the announcements newsgroup about how the size of a key was increasing, only three or four days before the we'd start seeing the change in API responses. Dealing with this needed a database migration that I would need more time to schedule, and I sent back a polite-but-direct response to the generic posting email expressing my disappointment with how little notice we received.
A couple minutes later a Google Chat bubble pops up from some guy named gdb (aka Greg Brockman), who I subsequently learned was Stripe's CTO. He apologized, asked why the timeline was tough for me, and when I explained it, immediately set something on my account so that the migration would be delayed by a couple weeks.
8 years later I remain impressed by that level of customer connection from a senior executive, and the technical excellence that allowed them to special-case delay my migration.
The Stripe docs are a master-class in API documentation. I strive to write APIs that reach the knees of the height of theirs, all while keeping the docs simple and understandable.
Amazing. No surprise from me the success they've had.
Another feature about the Stripe docs that made me go "shit, these guys are good". When you are looking at the docs in your account, the "examples" will come from your own sandbox calls if you've made them. I remember the first time I saw that I was like "wait a second, that's my test data". I thought that was such a brilliant little touch, one of those things that immediately seemed like such a great idea that I wondered why I hadn't thought of it before.
Seeing as Stripe is generally more expensive than other payment processors (including PayPal, particularly for <$12 transactions but even for large transactions at bulk, which I am sure Digital Ocean did), I'm sure finance noticed, one way or another ;P.
I, like my other devs dreamed of starting my own SAAS product when Stripe made it so easy to start accepting payments. No hyperbole here. I remember their tagline used to be "Payments for developers" back in 2012 when I found them and I remember setting it up within few minutes even back then.
Well deserved success to the Stripe team and we have been a happy customer in production since 2014. They even reached out to me once to discuss dashboard/UI change feedback. I know they have a few criticisms lately as they have grown but overall, if I could use the word "disruptor" (which usually is overused and cliched these days), it truly applies to Stripe. Kudos for not making me deal with Paypal and the others for the most part.
It also had immense influence on eng part as well. Stripe despite being a fintech startup set benchmarks of what we can expect in terms of developer friendliness.
I'd heard about Stripe for years but earlier this year I was finally given a solid opportunity to utilize it for a small-scale contract web development position. I was very pleasantly surprised at how easy to use it was, I expected a ton of boilerplate and dependencies but for a simple, straightforward PHP app, setting up secure payments was an absolute breeze. it's very satisfying to go in expecting headaches and edge cases and come away with a streamlined, efficient experience!
I remember, 10 years ago when Stripe launched. Our SaaS was using some shitty merchant account provider. We had to have a merchant account, which after tons of paperwork, we got.
Now, we were a travel technology SaaS (not a travel business), but our merchant provider closed our account without notice, because, according to them, we were selling consumer travel. With just under 100 subscribing customers at the time, this was very painful for us. They NEVER took the time to talk to us and see what our business was.
But just a few months earlier, Stripe launched.
We IMMEDIATELY signed up and did a very light integration. We manually called all our customers and input their credit cards. And we've been with Stripe since that time till today.
Brilliant service. Easy to integrate. Highly recommended.
Because of that pain though, we still are always prepared to go with a different provider if something happens, but so far, the other shoe has NOT dropped.
Stripe took the time to understand that we are a company that provides technology services to travel companies. Not a travel company.
I managed the Stripe relationship from my position at Google (Google Pay) and now happily have joined Stripe. Stripe was/is GPay's #1 partner and was always a joy to work with and now a joy to work within.
What happened to capture the flag? I still have my t-shirt. But let's talk about the product. As a business owner and a developer, I would prefer suppliers that can make their invoices / receipts available via an API. It's such a mess and would save so much data entry. Someone please make this happen!
My favorite thing about stripe isn't even their product. It's the support. I know when I have a question, I can reach out, and speak to someone who has some clue about what I need. It's really enjoyable, and I almost look forward to speaking with them it's so anathema to anything else.
Absolutely. I've been having a nightmare with PayPal for the past couple of weeks, to the point that they made me believe I maybe wasn't complying with local laws. I checked with Stripe to make sure my parallel use with them is all above board and properly legal. Got a very quick and comprehensive reply that it is. So of course PayPal are using "local law" as a scapegoat for their own bananas unnecessary rules.
This is my experience as well. If you have any issue, you just start a chat and they will find an explanation. So very different to the other dominant payment processor I won't mention that is trying its hardest to keep you away.
I don't use Stripe but my understanding is that it has dominance in its space. What are the competitors? BrainTree? Google Pay? Why haven't those services eaten Stripes lunch?
+ there are a lot of local players, e.g. Mollie is popular in the Netherlands, Payu and Przelewy24 are large providers in Poland, in China people pay with Wechat and Alipay, and in Indonesia with GoPay by Gojek
Stripe provides a lot of services besides payments, but if you just need a payment provide for your on-line shop, whether you go with Stripe or Braintree is not a very big difference. I mean sure, quality of documentation and customer service matters, but the 2 most important factors for people are pricing and support for the payment methods popular in your country (e.g. iDeal in the Netherlands, fast bank transfers in Poland etc.)
This reminds me of how I personally experienced the pain of writing payment code a year or so before Stripe came out, then quickly moved onto more fun stuff - exactly as described in the "Schlep blindness" essay - http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html
Stripe was a sea change for those of us who implemented PayPal. It was so much better it seemed too good to be true.
I’ll be cheering for them until they get too huge and complacent, and then some brilliant startup will disrupt them and the cycle of nature will continue.
[+] [-] ivyirwin|4 years ago|reply
As other have said here, Stripe was one of those things that just made sense. As a web developer I was tired of jumping through the many hoops of authorize.net or praying that people would complete the purchase path on PayPal. When Stripe came out I (apparently) jumped immediately on it and haven't looked back. It is the only payment solutions provider I offer my clients or use on my own projects.
But the larger impact it has had on me is that it gave me that much more faith in HN as a source of emerging technology solutions. I still comb through batch announcements or check out Show HNs to see what's coming, because I feel like there's a good chance another Stripe is launching today. And it's just as cool that Patrick Collison still is involved in HN. Thanks pc and the rest of you all at Stripe!
[+] [-] bugzz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrsstrm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] handrous|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JimmyL|4 years ago|reply
I still remember how one day there was a message on the announcements newsgroup about how the size of a key was increasing, only three or four days before the we'd start seeing the change in API responses. Dealing with this needed a database migration that I would need more time to schedule, and I sent back a polite-but-direct response to the generic posting email expressing my disappointment with how little notice we received.
A couple minutes later a Google Chat bubble pops up from some guy named gdb (aka Greg Brockman), who I subsequently learned was Stripe's CTO. He apologized, asked why the timeline was tough for me, and when I explained it, immediately set something on my account so that the migration would be delayed by a couple weeks.
8 years later I remain impressed by that level of customer connection from a senior executive, and the technical excellence that allowed them to special-case delay my migration.
[+] [-] torgard|4 years ago|reply
Amazing. No surprise from me the success they've had.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neom|4 years ago|reply
Me: We should probably switch to stripe eh?
Joonas: Yah, we should probably switch to stripe.
Brooke: Yup, we should probably switch to stripe.
Joonas: k.
Me: Hey Alex Sexton can you please get Joonas hooked up with what we need?
Alex Sexton: Yup
Joonas: k, done.
I'm not sure finance even noticed, it was really so easy.
[+] [-] saurik|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0des|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codegeek|4 years ago|reply
Well deserved success to the Stripe team and we have been a happy customer in production since 2014. They even reached out to me once to discuss dashboard/UI change feedback. I know they have a few criticisms lately as they have grown but overall, if I could use the word "disruptor" (which usually is overused and cliched these days), it truly applies to Stripe. Kudos for not making me deal with Paypal and the others for the most part.
[+] [-] newsbinator|4 years ago|reply
They've got a moat the size of an ocean.
[+] [-] kabes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alberth|4 years ago|reply
I do wonder what Stripe's financials look like given they have raised more funding than most startups ($2.2B raised [0]).
Given these extremely favorable market conditions, I have to imagine they are accelerating an IPO very soon (no inside knowledge).
[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/stripe
[+] [-] cm2012|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] poszlem|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KorematsuFredt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamrezich|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eric4smith|4 years ago|reply
I remember, 10 years ago when Stripe launched. Our SaaS was using some shitty merchant account provider. We had to have a merchant account, which after tons of paperwork, we got.
Now, we were a travel technology SaaS (not a travel business), but our merchant provider closed our account without notice, because, according to them, we were selling consumer travel. With just under 100 subscribing customers at the time, this was very painful for us. They NEVER took the time to talk to us and see what our business was.
But just a few months earlier, Stripe launched.
We IMMEDIATELY signed up and did a very light integration. We manually called all our customers and input their credit cards. And we've been with Stripe since that time till today.
Brilliant service. Easy to integrate. Highly recommended.
Because of that pain though, we still are always prepared to go with a different provider if something happens, but so far, the other shoe has NOT dropped.
Stripe took the time to understand that we are a company that provides technology services to travel companies. Not a travel company.
[+] [-] sklebe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xsc|4 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/xsc/status/106149101720186880
[+] [-] euoia|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iou|4 years ago|reply
https://stripe.com/invoicing
[+] [-] kondro|4 years ago|reply
Xero, amongst others, is starting to roll-out support.
The future is looking pretty good for B2B invoices.
[+] [-] k_sze|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] domlebo70|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grozzle|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kimi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] improvemewrong|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arnvald|4 years ago|reply
* Braintree (acquired by PayPal) * Checkout.com * Adyen (more enterprise oriented)
+ there are a lot of local players, e.g. Mollie is popular in the Netherlands, Payu and Przelewy24 are large providers in Poland, in China people pay with Wechat and Alipay, and in Indonesia with GoPay by Gojek
Stripe provides a lot of services besides payments, but if you just need a payment provide for your on-line shop, whether you go with Stripe or Braintree is not a very big difference. I mean sure, quality of documentation and customer service matters, but the 2 most important factors for people are pricing and support for the payment methods popular in your country (e.g. iDeal in the Netherlands, fast bank transfers in Poland etc.)
[+] [-] mLuby|4 years ago|reply
BrainTree was decent a few years ago, but PayPal acquired them and that seemed to drain the quality away.
There are other, older competitors that have much worse APIs and docs and support, but my impression is they survive due to implementation lock-in.
[+] [-] oliyoung|4 years ago|reply
Huge congrats, to say you've had an impact is an understatement.
[+] [-] haihaibye|4 years ago|reply
This reminds me of how I personally experienced the pain of writing payment code a year or so before Stripe came out, then quickly moved onto more fun stuff - exactly as described in the "Schlep blindness" essay - http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html
[+] [-] agustif|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juddlyon|4 years ago|reply
I’ll be cheering for them until they get too huge and complacent, and then some brilliant startup will disrupt them and the cycle of nature will continue.