What does Stripe do?
Stripe sells payments infrastructure for internet businesses: primarily, they help you bill your customers, process payments, and work with your payment data.
Last updated: March 3, 2025
Stripe sells payments infrastructure for internet businesses: primarily, they help you bill your customers, process payments, and work with your payment data.
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Accepting payments on the web is a pain in the ass that requires special bank accounts and working with companies with names like SecureNet and Authorize.Net (yikes)
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Stripe gives developers a set of simple APIs for accepting and managing payments, and a web interface to explore and manage data manually
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Stripe has expanded their product suite over time to include broader financial services and data products
In the developer world (and tech more broadly), Stripe is known as the gold standard for how to market to and build products for a technical (read: software engineer) audience. They’re also worth $36B, and are expanding into broader financial services.
Companies Mentioned
The core Stripe product: payments infrastructure
Your typical developer doesn’t have experience working with payment processing, and your typical early stage startup doesn’t have a finance guru who can help that developer. Stripe takes care of all of this for you via really well designed APIs. You don’t need to worry about storing data, charging cards, or managing subscriptions.
Payments (accepting and managing card and customer info) and billing (subscriptions and invoices) are Stripe’s two primary product lines, and if I had to guess, account for the overwhelming majority of their revenue. But as any company does as they grow (a lot), Stripe has released new product lines that integrate with each other and draw companies further into their ecosystem.
The core: payments
Stripe offers a lot of products, which can make it difficult to understand what they do exactly. To avoid that problem, let’s pretend that we’re a company called Dubstack that lets people create and write newsletters (just an...