Deep Dive: Stripe’s payments APIs - The first 10 years

In this Deep Dive, I took a walk through Stripe’s last decade of payments API evolution. If you’re building or working with payment integrations, this story is gold.

TL: DR

Hey folks! In this Deep Dive, I took a walk through Stripe’s last decade of payments API evolution based on Stripe’s explanation on their blog—and wow, what a journey it’s been. Remember the legendary “seven lines of code”? That tiny snippet became a symbol for just how easy Stripe made payments look back in 2011. But as the company grew, so did the complexity of its API. From supporting just US card payments, they expanded to ACH, Bitcoin, and global methods like SEPA and iDEAL—which meant wrestling with asynchronous flows, state machines, and all sorts of integration nightmares.

Stripe’s big “aha” moment came when they realized patching the old Charges and Tokens model wasn’t going to cut it. So, they started from scratch. Enter PaymentIntents and PaymentMethods—two new abstractions that finally unified all payment methods under one consistent API. This redesign wasn’t just technical; it was a two-year marathon involving docs rewrites, Stripe CLI tools, and smart packaging to help devs adopt the new model without breaking a sweat.

If you’re building or working with payment integrations, this story is gold. It’s a rare peek into how thoughtful API design—and a lot of humility—can lead to something scalable, flexible, and powerful. Stripe didn’t just build APIs; they redefined how we think about accepting payments.

---

Stripe’s payments APIs - The first 10 years

A few years ago, Bloomberg Businessweek published a feature story on Stripe. Four words spanned the center of the cover: “seven lines of code,” suggesting that’s all it took for a business to power payments on Stripe. The assertion was bold—and became a theme and meme for Stripe.

To this day, it’s not entirely clear which seven lines the article referenced. The prevailing theory is that it’s the roughly seven lines of curl it took to create a Charge. In 2011, the code snippet featured on its landing page was nine lines long. But remove the optional description and card[cvc], and there are visually seven lines:

A partial screenshot of Stripe.com, circa 2011. Courtesy of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

However, a search for the seven lines of code ultimately misses the point: the ability to open up a terminal, run this curl snippet, then immediately see a successful credit card payment felt like seven lines of code. It’s unlikely that a developer believed a production-ready payments integration involved literally only seven lines of code. But taking something as complex as credit card processing and reducing the integration to only a few lines of code that, when run, immediately returns a successful Charge object is really quite magical.

Abstracting away the complexity of payments has driven the evolution of its APIs over the last decade. This post provides the context, inflection points, and conceptual frameworks behind its API design. It’s the extreme exception that its approach to APIs makes the cover of a business magazine. This post shares a bit more of how we’ve grown around and beyond those seven lines.

A condensed history of Stripe’s payments APIs

Successful products tend to organically expand over time, resulting in product debt. Similar to tech debt, product debt accumulates gradually, making the product harder to understand for users and change for product teams. For API products, it’s particularly tempting to accrue product debt because it’s hard to get your users to fundamentally restructure their integration; it’s much easier to get them to add a parameter or two to their existing API requests.