Stripe is a new online payments start-up company that was co-founded by two brothers, John and Patrick Collison. The company is an online business to business (B2B) and business to consumer payments provider. Stripe first gained notice back in March when TechCrunch heard about the brothers’ new venture and made it public. (The Collison brothers are best known for selling their start-up, Auctomatic, to Live Current Media for $5 million.) At that point, Stripe had earned approximately $2 million in a venture round from PayPal founders, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, as well as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and SV Angel. It was during this venture round in which Stripe was rumored to have been valued at $20 million.
Just this week (yesterday), Stripe, the “API that gets out of your way,” officially launched to the public. Since the release, we have now been able to gather some more information on how the company plans to make waves in a online payment space dominated by PayPal, and some others. Stripe, which had previously been in private beta, claims to be a more developer- and user-friendly payment platform.
Now, if you’re wondering what the perks of Stripe are…here you go:
Basics
- It supports Ruby, PHP, Python, and others.
- You don’t need a merchant account or gateway.
- Stripe handles every aspect of the transaction, including storing cards, subscriptions, and direct payouts to the merchant’s bank account.
- There are no contracts to sign. Merchants can close their accounts at any time without incurring termination fees.
Pricing
- Stripe costs .29% + 30 cents for every successful charge. There are no setup fees or monthly costs. There is no fee for declined charges.
- Refunds are free, but the fee from the original charge is not refunded.
- Earnings are transferred to the merchant’s bank account on a 7 day rolling basis.
Accepted Transactions
- Stripe supports Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, JCB, and Diners Club cards.
- Stripe allows the merchant to choose the name displayed on customers’ credit card statements.
- Stripe can be used to charge non-US customers in nearly any currency (the amount will be converted to USD at the current exchange rate).
Developer-Friendly
- Stripe is created, supported, and maintained by a 10-person team of developers who have worked on other successful start-ups, including Lala, Mockingbird, Auctomatic, Cappuccino, Encyclopedia, and Observer.
- Support is available via email, phone, or in the Stripe Campfire chatroom.
Security
- Stripe has been audited by a PCI-certified auditor and is certified to PCI Service Provider Level 1 (the most stringent level of certification available).
- Stripe forces HTTPS connections for all services.
- Credit card numbers are encrypted and go directly to Stripe’s secure environment. They never hit developer servers.
According to today’s article about Stripe from TechCrunch, one of the Collison brothers (we’re guessing Patrick) spoke with author Leena Rao and said that “the company will be coming out with more details on the platform soon.” We are interested to see what will come from Stripe and how the online payment ecosystem will respond, especially in the wake of waves being made by other companies, like Square, PayPal, and Google.
Sidenote: Patrick Collison has a very interesting story. Check out this Wikipedia article about him, plus his website, blog (though, it is not recently updated), and Twitter account.
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