Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Besides your product, I thank you all at Stripe for setting an example of what real API/SDK documentation is.

> I thank you all at Stripe for setting an example of what real API/SDK documentation is.

It's not just their documentation, Stripe's versioning, backwards compatibility support, and fast improvements probably make it the single best API I've ever worked with.

I have new projects that use the latest and greatest Stripe API and features, but also older projects that use their 5 year old APIs, and both work without a hitch.

> It's not just their documentation, Stripe's versioning, backwards compatibility support, and fast improvements probably make it the single best API I've ever worked with.

I completely agree - I consider Stripe the gold standard for an API. Best I've ever used.

Now if the fee was under 3% instead of being the very same price as Paypal, that would be a nice welcome bit of competition.

Their newly announced corporate credit card has good benefits (US only): https://stripe.com/en-ca/corporate-card

At least you get some cash back from expenses.

Meanwhile, PayPal’s CSV transaction export feature is still underdocumented and shows that an account’s transaction history is not immutable: https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/65917/calculating-...

Its the basis upon which I form my opinion as to what "good docs" look like. It makes you incredibly spoiled when trying to use some of Stripe's competitors.

I've integrated 8+ payments APIs over my career. IMO, Stripe's "secret sauce" is the quality of the API and the documentation. It's so compelling that I repeatedly choose Stripe over other payments systems that offer network effects like PayPal and Amazon.

I sometimes get asked by customers if we take PayPal. I tell them truthfully "no, it's just too much trouble".

It doesn't seem like "better developer experience" is much of a moat, but based on how bad the competition is - year after year - it sure seems to be. I wonder what other services could be "disrupted" the same way.

I had the same experience my first go at integrating Stripe.

I was able to accept donations in all the ways I wanted:

  - using Netlify (free hosting, includes lambda)
  - custom amounts
  - one-time payment or recurring
  - form on my own site

code is here:

https://github.com/revddit/revddit/blob/master/lambda-src/do...

https://github.com/revddit/revddit/blob/master/src/pages/com...

> I repeatedly choose Stripe over other payments systems that offer network effects like PayPal and Amazon.

For one of the first SaSS products I ever worked on, I (naively) chose Amazon payments. Within six months, Amazon introduced backwards incompatible changes. Six months later, they did it again. For another project I started 5 years ago, I used Stripe. We're still using the same 5 year old API and it works perfectly, even though Stripe has added new features and bells and whistles in their newer versions. Their commitment to backwards compatibility is probably the best I've seen of any fast moving API.

Totally agree. I implemented stuff like Paypal and Adyen. Bit of a horror show. But even Stripe's API has some gotcha's.

I documented how I implemented Stripe for the SaaS I run quite extensively at https://blog.checklyhq.com/our-stripe-billing-implementation...

A quick look at the documentation and I'm impressed and a little jealous. Do you know if this is a proprietary API doc generator similar to Swagger?

Here’s a framework that helps generate documentation similar to Stripe’s: https://github.com/slatedocs/slate

As far as I can tell, Stripe invented this type of documentation that you see everywhere else now.

And thank you also for your CTFs. I almost finished CTF 2 (I had the 3/4 of last password) and I learned a lot during this CTF. I am very proud of my T-Shirt.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com