Stripe

Stripe is the leading payment infrastructure platform providing APIs for businesses to accept payments, manage subscriptions, handle payouts, and operate financial workflows at any scale. Founded in 2010 by Patrick and John Collison, Stripe processes hundreds of billions of dollars annually for companies ranging from solo developers (using Stripe's free tier) to global enterprises like Amazon, Ford, LVMH, and Shopify. Stripe's core value proposition is developer experience: a clean, consistent REST API with SDKs in every major language, an interactive API dashboard, comprehensive documentation with working code examples, and a fully functional test mode with simulated card numbers — all available without a sales conversation or approval process. A developer can accept a live payment in under 30 minutes. Beyond core payments, Stripe has expanded into a full financial services platform: Stripe Billing for recurring subscriptions and metered billing, Stripe Connect for marketplace and platform payouts, Stripe Radar for ML-powered fraud detection, Stripe Tax for automatic tax calculation and remittance across 40+ countries, Stripe Issuing for virtual card creation, and Stripe Treasury for embedded banking.