Do people feel Stripe APIs are really that good? I’ve always found them unintuitive, tons of options, weird edge cases, breaking occasionally, etc.
I’m sure payments are convoluted, but I’d still imagine they could be meaningfully easier for the bulk 80% of use case?
They are certainly much better than the competition. That said, do not believe the marketing hype. If you want to accept various kinds of payments, you will eventually run into the stupid limitations of the payment system, and Stripe APIs will not abstract this for you in spite of what they advertise.
For example, redirect-based payment methods (iDEAL, Bancontact, Sofort) are a huge source of complexity, and handling all the additional states a payment can be in is far from obvious. Stripe mostly just drops them in your lap and says "deal with it".
I work for a competitor and can confidently say they have amazing docs. Payments are complex, and they definitely do cover the bulk 80% case in a REALLY good way.
We have this workshop thing we make most new joiners go through where they integrate our own APIs into a demo app and the number 1 response from anyone familiar with the wider payments industry is that we should aim to make our docs more like Stripe's lol
I have implemented the Swift payment Spec and I can tell you having this abstracted in a nice API is so much better.
Stripe's APIs are very good. They could be better, but it's difficult to change the underpinnings of financial infrastructure. A lot of risk, little incentive to move, and you're designing something that has to last (and make sense) for 15+ years in the future.
I worked on this at Stripe in 2022. We were the first teams to start building v2 APIs and data models to solve exactly this problem. The first target launch date (in Feb 2022) was November 2022. It was launched in May of 2025.
My reporting line, as an EM, was Netflix, Oracle, Oracle. No one had startup experience. It was drenched in politics. The engineers were largely brilliant, kind, and hardworking.
I still love the company and believe in Patrick. Believe me, he deeply understands what you're saying and wants it to be the best it can be. But it was clear to me, even then, that they'd lost a lot of what made them special. They could maintain it, but I wasn't sure they could do it again. Banking-as-a-Service was one opportunity, Link was another, and now this will be a third. We'll see. (I say this with a lot of love for Stripe and Stripes.)
Coincidentally, I had a conversation with a recruiter at Anthropic and saw them doing something very similar. They were starting a new team in a new vertical and wanted someone with experience running an org of 100+ people. I would bet real money that it will be a fraction of the product/impact it could be (though still probably make money!)
> Netflix, Oracle, Oracle
Well that brings back some memories. I remember there was a third Oracle in that chain, but he left earlier compared to the others.
Yes, Stripe is extremely good at what they do. Payments are complicated.
Payments themselves are so much complicated. Payments to support multi-currency, jurisdictions, countries, scenarios, that's complicated.
I'm friends with a payment docs writer. Holy crap are payments complicated.
I mean. They used to be good. When they started out their docs were absolutely far above the competition. They aren’t now, and Stripe has lived long enough that they’ve seen themselves become the villain.
Stripe has the worst payment APIs, except for all the others.
Feature bloat definitely made their API and product docs harder than the early days. Stripe Checkout would have saved my teams days, but I agree, they need to go back to their roots and make the 99% use case very easy.
I expect many of the warts in the API surface are there because they want to avoid changing things for fear of breaking someone else's business.