Stripe Blog: Archive
Reproducible research: Stripe’s approach to data science
When people talk about their data infrastructure, they tend to focus on the technologies. However, we’ve found that just as important as the technologies themselves are the principles that guide their use. Here's our experience with one such principle that we’ve found useful: reproducibility.
Service discovery at Stripe
With so many new technologies coming out every year (like Kubernetes or Habitat), it’s easy to become so entangled in our excitement about the future that we forget to pay homage to the tools that have been quietly supporting our production environments. One such tool we've been using at Stripe for several years now is Consul. Consul helps discover services (that is, it helps us navigate the thousands of servers we run with various services running on them and tells us which ones are up and available for use). This effective and practical architectural choice wasn't flashy or entirely novel, but has served us dutifully in our continued mission to provide reliable service to our users around the world.
A primer on machine learning for fraud detection
Stripe Radar is a collection of tools to help businesses detect and prevent fraud. At Radar’s core is a machine learning engine that scans every card payment across Stripe’s 100,000+ businesses, aggregates information from those payments into behavioral signals that are predictive of fraud, and blocks payments that have a high probability of being fraudulent. Here's how we use machine learning to detect and prevent fraud.
Introducing Veneur: high performance and global aggregation for Datadog
When a company writes about their observability stack, they often focus on sweet visualizations, advanced anomaly detection or innovative data stores. Those are well and good, but today we’d like to talk about the tip of the spear when it comes to observing your systems: metrics pipelines! Metrics pipelines are how we get metrics from where they happen—our hosts and services—to storage quickly and efficiently so they can be queried, all without interrupting the host service.
Stripe in Singapore!
Today, we’re excited to fully launch Stripe to all Singaporean businesses—any entrepreneur in Singapore can now instantly start accepting payments.
Instant Payouts for Marketplaces
Starting today, marketplaces using Stripe Connect can send Instant Payouts to sellers or service providers on their platform. To start, it’ll be available to marketplaces in the U.S. using Managed Accounts.
Get ready for Apple Pay on the Web
Apple Pay on the Web will be available later this fall. (Apple has not yet published an exact date.) We’ve received a lot of questions about how the integration will work and we’ve been working closely with Apple to ensure that the implementation will be quick and easy for Stripe users.
Why some businesses aren’t allowed
We’re building business infrastructure. As with other kinds of infrastructure (like hosting or electricity), we'd like to make it available to as broad a set of users as possible. While we may personally like some businesses on Stripe and disapprove of others, we want to make as few judgements as possible as a company. The world doesn’t need more gatekeepers.
Managed Accounts in Europe
Today, we’re thrilled to launch Managed Accounts for Stripe Connect to marketplaces based in the U.K., Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway.
UI components for iOS
We’ve added reusable UI components in our latest iOS SDK that make it easy to accept both Apple Pay and regular credit card payments through a single, unified integration. The UI library supports automatically detecting Apple Pay, storing cards for future use, and custom styling. We hope these prebuilt components drastically reduce the time needed to create beautiful, high-conversion iOS checkout flows.
Atlas update
We announced Atlas a few months ago and we’re so excited by the amount of interest we’ve already received. Since launching the beta, over 440 startups from 91 countries are already using Atlas to get up and running with Stripe. More broadly, we’ve received applications from entrepreneurs in almost every country.
Native support for taxes and shipping
In the past year, we’ve added deeper support for representing products and orders to the core Stripe API. By working with products and orders, we can start to remove a lot of the unnecessary complexity that companies currently deal with—manually calculating taxes, figuring out shipping costs, or even just keeping product and inventory data in sync with all their systems.
iOS and Android updates
Over the past few months, we’ve made a few changes for iOS and Android that might be useful for your apps: Apple Pay in Canada, Australia, and Singapore, Android Pay in the UK, support for Discover cards, and mobile viewport control.
BYOT
Do you know anyone who makes you incredibly better at what you do? People who motivate and inspire you, complement your strengths and shore up your weaknesses, help you achieve things you could never do on your own? Maybe it’s your old cofounders, your college roommates, your collaborators on an open source project, or even your siblings; whoever it is, you’re stronger as a team than you are apart. Working together, each of you has a valuable advantage—you could call it a network effect—over anyone who works alone.
Upgrading to SHA-2 and TLS 1.2
To keep your integration with Stripe secure, we plan to progressively phase out support for old technologies: SHA-1, TLS 1.0, and TLS 1.1. (These protocols currently power the ‘Secure’ in ‘HTTPS’.)
Open-Source Retreat meetup 2016
This January, we invited three developers to come work on open-source projects full-time at Stripe. We specifically chose projects for this Open-Source Retreat that we felt would have deep impact in a variety of different areas. Over the past few months, our grantees have made significant progress on their projects.
Accept ACH payments
Even though there are many benefits, accepting ACH payments—that is, payments where you charge a bank account directly—has traditionally been pretty difficult. Doing so has generally involved baroque, legacy APIs. There’s additional complexity compared to credit cards because the transaction amounts are typically larger and authorization is subtler. Still, being able to handle ACH payments with Stripe has come up a lot as a feature request over the years. And so, today, we’re delighted to launch support for ACH payments for all U.S. Stripe users.
Open-Source Retreat 2016 grantees
Like many developers, we often contribute to open-source software in bits and pieces over long periods of time. So we started the Open-Source Retreat to help open-source developers make concentrated progress on features and releases with the potential for significant impact. For 2016’s Retreat, we’re inviting three developers to work on their projects from Stripe’s office in SF.
Open-Source Retreat 2016
We increasingly rely on (and contribute back to!) a lot of open-source software to build Stripe, and we’d like to give back and get more people working on open-source.
Last year, we invited four developers to the Stripe office as part of our first Open-Source Retreat. Our grantees made significant progress on their projects in a relatively short time. Starting January, we’re hosting another Open-Source Retreat at Stripe.
Scaling email transparency
In February 2013, we blogged about email transparency at Stripe. Since then a number of other companies have implemented their own versions of it (which a few have talked about publicly). We often get asked whether email transparency is still around, and if so, how we've scaled it.