Three weeks, three vendors, and thirty screens of compliance forms to charge a single credit card. Every founder we have met rebuilds the same broken plumbing.
Founders wait 2 to 6 weeks for a merchant ID, a gateway contract, and a PCI questionnaire before they can accept their first dollar. Payments incumbents still ask for faxed tax forms.
Interchange plus, tiered, blended, monthly minimums, PCI fees, chargeback fees, statement fees. Average effective rate for a small shop is 4.1%, not the 2.4% the sales rep quoted.
SOAP envelopes, return URLs, signed XML payloads, no test mode, no webhooks. A developer writes 800 lines of glue code to do what should be one HTTP request.
Three shifts in 2011 make a developer-first payments API inevitable.
US online retail hit $194B in 2011, growing 16% YoY while offline retail crawled at 3.8%. Every new business is a web business.
Twilio, GitHub, Heroku, and AWS proved developers will sign up with a credit card at 2 AM. No sales call, no RFP, no negotiated MSA.
Rails 3, Node 0.6, and Heroku turned a weekend project into a production business. Payments is the last unbundled piece, and the most painful.
One library, one test key, one flat price. The entire payment stack collapsed into a single HTTP request.
gem install stripe · npm install stripe · pip install stripe. No merchant application. No PCI audit on day one.
Stripe::Charge.create with amount, currency, and card token. We handle the rest, tokenization, PCI scope, fraud, retries, receipts.
Funds settle to your bank in two days. Flat rate. No hidden fees. No surprises at statement time.
# Accept a $20 charge require 'stripe' Stripe.api_key = 'sk_test_...' Stripe::Charge.create( amount: 2000, currency: 'usd', source: 'tok_visa' )
Real-time volume and charge count, updated every 3 seconds via webhook stream.
MRR first-class citizen, not an add-on. Subscription lifecycle built into core.
Every charge clickable for full request and response log. Zero hidden state.
Bottom-up: every new internet business needs to charge a card. We price per transaction. Our TAM grows with e-commerce.
Incumbent payments is a sales-led, enterprise-contract business. Every business above needs a credit-card API, but only developers can evaluate them, and no existing processor is built for developers.
Global e-commerce is growing 18% YoY. By 2016 this TAM doubles to $240B. We serve it with a single code path.
No setup fees. No monthly fees. No cancellation fees. Margin improves 10 to 20 bps per year as volume grows and interchange negotiates down.
| Provider | API-first | Flat pricing | Setup < 10 min | Subscriptions built-in | Test mode |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stripe | YES | YES | YES | YES | YES |
| PayPal | no | no | no | no | no |
| Authorize.Net | no | no | no | no | YES |
| Braintree | YES | no | no | no | YES |
| WePay | no | YES | YES | no | no |
Competitive moats that sustain: the API is hand-built by developers for developers, and the pricing strips out every lever incumbents use to grow margin at the customer's expense.
They can clone the endpoint. They cannot clone the ecosystem, the data, or the developer mind-share.
Engineers pick the payments stack. Every dev who ships with us becomes the default choice at their next company. 7x organic referral rate.
Every charge trains our model. We catch fraud at 2.3x the industry baseline today, and the gap widens with every incremental transaction.
Once Stripe is the auth, billing, subscription, and reporting system of record, switching is a six-month engineering project, not a credentials swap.
PCI DSS Level 1, money-transmitter licenses in 45 states, bank partnerships in 3 countries. New entrants spend 2+ years and $10M+ to match the compliance floor.
We do not have a sales team. We have a docs team, and every engineer who integrates becomes our distribution.
Founded Auctomatic at 19 (sold to Live Current Media for $5M). MIT dropout. Won the Young Scientist of the Year award in Ireland at 16 for an AI-driven programming language.
Co-built Auctomatic. Harvard dropout. Led product at Auctomatic post-acquisition. Writes most of the documentation, and believes docs are the product.
Ship subscriptions · international expansion · SDK coverage across 7 languages.
PCI DSS Level 1 certification · money-transmitter licensing in the remaining 45 states.
Docs team · conference presence · open-source tooling to reduce integration friction.