Stripe Payments History

Stripe is so widely used, being aware of the history of it is useful if you work in payments

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 us.

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 our landing page was nine lines long. But remove the optional description and card[cvc], and there’s visually seven lines: