Stripe is a payments platform for online businesses. It handles card, wallet and bank payments, and adds hosted checkout and payment links, subscription billing (Stripe Billing), sales tax (Stripe Tax) and marketplace payouts (Connect).
Stripe Radar, a machine learning fraud system fully integrated with your payments, helps you identify and prevent fraud. You can also accept payments in person using Stripe Terminal. Stripe says its whole platform is built to reduce declines and increase revenue. Stripe includes built-in reporting, or you can build custom reports through the API. Once a transaction has settled, you get paid through the API or the Dashboard.
Stripe’s documentation offers setup guides for different business types. They cover online startups accepting simple payments, SaaS startups selling subscriptions and brick-and-mortar businesses accepting payments in person. Other guides cover sending invoices to collect payments and selling digital products such as software and downloads with Stripe as your merchant of record. For businesses that pay out funds to recipients around the world, a guide explains opening a financial account that can receive, hold, convert and send money.
Stripe’s APIs, libraries and SDKs let developers design a secure, customized payment flow. The Stripe CLI can provision a sandbox with working API keys for testing. You can extend your account with tools from Stripe’s integrations, and the Dashboard mobile app shows your daily earnings, new customers and payments on the go. Stripe says all customers get phone, email and chat help, plus support resources and a developer Discord server, and its support plans add priority support.
Standard pricing is a percentage plus a fixed fee for each successful card payment, and large businesses can ask about options such as interchange-plus or volume discounts. Current rates are in the pricing box above.