I hadn't worked with payment systems for a number of years, but recently added Stripe to a quick MVP I built (bitcoinvoice.com). It took two hours. I couldn't believe how easy it was, and how nice the UX of the whole thing was.

I imagined the usual song and dance of writing a bunch of back-end code to handle all their weird requests, worrying about double checking everything in the requests to make sure nobody can spoof them, etc, etc. Ya know, the dumb stuff that takes hours to write, hours to test, and days to wait for support to get back to you because their test servers are broken.

And then I imagined waiting days for them to approve my account for live transactions, requiring scanned copies of my driver's license with me flashing some sort of gang sign while reciting page 452 of the 1993 re-print of Moby Dick.

Nope. Turned out they have a synchronous API for processing payment so I don't need to handle callbacks on the backend. Turned out the front end code was, yeah about 7 lines (more with a few tweaks). And their documentation injects your keys into the sample code for you (wow)! On top of all that ... they had Go sample code!

And when I went to enable my live account, I'm pretty sure all they asked for was name and address, maybe TIN. Nothing else. No wait. Just ... bam, I was enabled and could start accepting live payments.

It was perhaps the most pleasant API integration I've ever done.

There are _some_ rough spots. They don't really explain Radar, their fraud protection very well. It wasn't clear to me if it was automatically included and handled. shrugs. And though they advertised support for Bitcoin payments, it turns out you have to use their async API to accept Bitcoin payments. I was willing to accept zero-conf payments, so I figured I could just keep using their synchronous API, but I guess not.