Stripe made getting paid easy. Now it sells for you.

It is a little after midnight in Lisbon, and a two-person software company has just shipped a new plan. Within the hour, a designer in São Paulo pays with Pix, a student in Seoul taps through with Kakao Pay, and a manager in Ohio subscribes with a card she saved months ago on another site. Each of them sees the price in their own currency. Each gets a proper receipt. Behind the scenes, sales tax and VAT are calculated, collected and set aside for the right governments.

Nobody at the company is awake for any of it. That, more or less, is what Stripe has spent sixteen years building.

Sixteen years of sweating the details#

Patrick and John Collison, two brothers from Ireland, founded Stripe in 2010 on a hunch that getting paid online was a software problem rather than a banking one. Its first job was helping companies accept credit cards in the US with a few lines of code.

The hunch paid off. Businesses running on Stripe generated $1.9 trillion in total volume in 2025, up 34 percent on the year before, according to the company's annual letter, and more than five million businesses use it directly or through platforms built on it. The product list has grown just as fast: at its Sessions conference in late April 2026, Stripe announced 288 new products and features.

The easiest way to understand Stripe today is as a set of building blocks that snap together around one account, one dashboard and one API (an application programming interface, the menu of commands a developer's code can send).

Every way to say yes at checkout#

Payments is the core, online and in person, with more than 135 currencies and payment methods, from cards and wallets to bank transfers and local favorites.

Several ways to build a checkout sit on top. Checkout is a ready-made payment page that Stripe hosts and keeps tuning, and a new Checkout studio, in preview, lets teams configure and A/B test it. Elements sits at the other end: a kit of payment components a developer drops into their own design. Payment Links skip code entirely: create a link in the dashboard and paste it into an email or a post. Invoicing does the same for bills, sending one-off or recurring invoices without any programming.

Link, Stripe's saved-details wallet, ties these together. Shoppers who save their details once can pay on any Link-enabled site, and Stripe says Link now reaches more than 300 million consumers. Adaptive Pricing shows prices in the shopper's local currency, with an AI model now helping choose which one. For the physical world, Terminal supplies card readers, plus Tap to Pay, which turns a compatible iPhone or Android phone into a contactless terminal.

Subscriptions are where it gets clever.#

Billing handles subscriptions, trials, upgrades and usage-based pricing, the pay-for-what-you-use model that AI companies have made familiar. Stripe says Billing manages more than 200 million active subscriptions, and its AI-powered Smart Retries and automatic card updates rescue payments that would otherwise fail. For companies with complicated metering, Metronome, now a Stripe product, powers usage-based and hybrid pricing.

Tax is the chore most founders dread, and Stripe Tax automates it. It works out where a business owes sales tax, VAT or GST, calculates it on every transaction, and covers more than 100 countries and every US state, with filing available through Stripe and its partners. Revenue Recognition turns all that billing into accrual accounting that follows the ASC 606 and IFRS 15 standards, so the books close faster. Sigma lets anyone query their Stripe data in SQL, or ask a question in plain language and let its AI assistant write the report.

Let Stripe be the merchant of record.#

Everything above still leaves a business as the seller. Managed Payments changes that. It makes Stripe the merchant of record (the company legally responsible for the sale) for digital products such as software, SaaS subscriptions, video games, e-books, audiobooks, online courses and web hosting.

Sell software to consumers around the world and you can owe VAT in Europe, GST in Australia and sales tax across US states, each with its own registrations, rates and filing calendar. With Managed Payments, Stripe calculates, collects, files and remits those taxes in more than 80 countries, so a business can sell there without running a local entity in each one. Where Managed Payments does not cover a country's tax, Stripe Tax can calculate it at no extra cost.

It reaches well beyond tax:

• Fraud. Stripe runs fraud prevention with AI and real-time monitoring, and configures the rules and block lists itself.
• Disputes. When a customer disputes a charge with their bank, Stripe reviews the case, using automated tools and human reviewers, and submits evidence for the business.
• Customer support. Questions about a payment, refund or subscription go to Link's support team. Buyers can see their order history, cancel or change subscriptions and update cards on Link's website. Stripe contacts the business only when it needs product-specific input.
• Paperwork. Receipts, invoices and refund notices go out automatically.
• Local checkout. Adaptive Pricing is on by default, and local methods such as Pix in Brazil, UPI in India and Kakao Pay in South Korea appear alongside cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay.

To the buyer, the purchase shows as sold through Link, Stripe's consumer brand. A business switches it on in Checkout or Payment Links, and subscriptions run through Billing as usual.

At Sessions in April 2026, Stripe opened Managed Payments to all digital businesses. Sellers need to be based in a supported country, a list that includes the US and Canada, all 27 EU countries, the UK, Norway, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, Australia, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore, and Stripe runs an eligibility check. Buyers can be in more than 195 countries and territories. Physical goods, consulting and live events are out of scope, as are marketplaces built on Connect. The details live in the Managed Payments docs.

The math that makes it a bargain#

Consider what selling software worldwide asks of a company that does it alone. In the United States, the Supreme Court's 2018 South Dakota v. Wayfair decision lets states require out-of-state sellers to collect sales tax once their sales into the state pass a threshold, and every state with a statewide sales tax now has such a rule. Each one means its own registration, its own answer to whether software is taxable at all, its own rates down to the city and county, and its own filing calendar.

Cross the Atlantic and the European Union taxes digital services where the customer lives. The seller has to work out which of 27 countries each buyer is in, keep evidence of that location, charge that country's VAT rate and file returns every quarter. The UK, Norway, Switzerland, Australia, Japan and dozens of other countries run their own versions of the same rules.

Doing all of that alone means registrations and tax advisers in one jurisdiction after another, filing software, audits, a support desk answering billing questions across time zones and someone assembling evidence for every chargeback. It is a back office that costs real money every month, long before the first big customer arrives.

Managed Payments turns that back office into one line on the price list: 3.5% per successful transaction, on top of Stripe's standard processing fees. The fee covers the global tax handling, fraud prevention, dispute management and transaction-level customer support described above. Instead of a growing stack of tax registrations and the people to keep up with them, a team of a few people can sell to buyers in more than 195 countries from the first day and spend its hours on the product.

The rest of the back office#

Radar is Stripe's fraud system, a machine-learning model trained on data from across the Stripe network, so patterns spotted at one business can help protect another. It now covers account fraud and customer abuse as well as bad payments, including free-trial abuse, a growing headache for AI companies. Identity verifies new users by checking government ID documents and matching them to a selfie.

Connect is the toolkit for platforms and marketplaces that move money between many parties, handling onboarding, payouts and embeddable dashboards. Issuing lets a company create its own virtual and physical cards with real-time spending controls, and Stripe is extending it to AI agents that spend within limits a business sets. Capital offers eligible businesses financing based on their Stripe sales, repaid automatically as a fixed share of daily revenue. Treasury provides business accounts, and transfers between US Stripe businesses are now free and instant.

At the start of a company's life, Atlas incorporates a Delaware C corporation or LLC, obtains its tax ID, issues founder shares and files the 83(b) election, typically within two business days. Stripe says a quarter of all Delaware corporations are now created with Atlas. Climate, meanwhile, lets any business direct a slice of revenue to permanent carbon removal through Frontier.

Money for machines#

The newest frontier is money that moves like data. Stablecoins are digital currencies pegged to a traditional currency such as the dollar, and Stripe has gone deep. Businesses can accept stablecoin payments and settle in ordinary currency, issue stablecoin-backed cards, and, in preview, hold dollar balances in stablecoin financial accounts. Bridge handles stablecoin orchestration and Privy provides wallets, both now Stripe companies. Tempo, a payments-first blockchain created by Stripe and the investment firm Paradigm, has run its main network since March 2026, with fees paid in stablecoins rather than a volatile token.

Shopping by AI agent is the other frontier. The Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open standard developed by Stripe, OpenAI and Meta, defines how an agent and a business complete a purchase on a buyer's behalf, and Shared Payment Tokens let an agent start a payment without ever seeing the buyer's card. The Agentic Commerce Suite lets a merchant upload its catalog once and sell through multiple AI agents, and Stripe has announced work with Google and Meta to bring checkout into AI Mode, the Gemini app and Facebook ads. Link's agent wallet gives each task a single-use card and asks the person to approve every payment. And the Machine Payments Protocol, written with Tempo, lets software pay software in tiny increments, in stablecoins or ordinary currency.

One account, a whole company#

What makes the catalog remarkable is less any single product than the way they share one account. A founder can incorporate with Atlas, take a first payment through a Payment Link, add subscriptions, hand tax and disputes to Managed Payments and analyze it all in Sigma without switching providers. Every piece is laid out in Stripe's documentation, which is still where most of these stories begin.