Yes, Stripe is extremely good at what they do. Payments are complicated.

I have implemented the Swift payment Spec and I can tell you having this abstracted in a nice API is so much better.

Stripe's APIs are very good. They could be better, but it's difficult to change the underpinnings of financial infrastructure. A lot of risk, little incentive to move, and you're designing something that has to last (and make sense) for 15+ years in the future.

I worked on this at Stripe in 2022. We were the first teams to start building v2 APIs and data models to solve exactly this problem. The first target launch date (in Feb 2022) was November 2022. It was launched in May of 2025.

My reporting line, as an EM, was Netflix, Oracle, Oracle. No one had startup experience. It was drenched in politics. The engineers were largely brilliant, kind, and hardworking.

I still love the company and believe in Patrick. Believe me, he deeply understands what you're saying and wants it to be the best it can be. But it was clear to me, even then, that they'd lost a lot of what made them special. They could maintain it, but I wasn't sure they could do it again. Banking-as-a-Service was one opportunity, Link was another, and now this will be a third. We'll see. (I say this with a lot of love for Stripe and Stripes.)

Coincidentally, I had a conversation with a recruiter at Anthropic and saw them doing something very similar. They were starting a new team in a new vertical and wanted someone with experience running an org of 100+ people. I would bet real money that it will be a fraction of the product/impact it could be (though still probably make money!)

I mean. They used to be good. When they started out their docs were absolutely far above the competition. They aren’t now, and Stripe has lived long enough that they’ve seen themselves become the villain.

I expect many of the warts in the API surface are there because they want to avoid changing things for fear of breaking someone else's business.