As a developer tool, integrating Stripe Projects felt a lot like adding "Sign in with Google" - Stripe acts as a trusted identity and billing provider, but for agents instead of humans. The core insight is that agent commerce is a trust problem: an agent can't (shouldn't?) enter a credit card or verify an email, so you need a trusted third party to KYC both sides. Stripe already has that relationship with both developers and customers.
It's a smooth experience overall - try it out.
I wrote more about agent experience here: https://www.philipithomas.com/agent-experience
Use cases: create accounts, set up billing, manage secrets, manage resources, get invoices/receipts
Finally, I don’t know if it’s better to use a CLI imperative approach or a more declarative one like IaC
My scripts typically also serve as technical documentation for specific features and they are a sort of "unique source of truth".
Declarative solutions are perfectly fast and capable as well. They can use all the same tooling under the hood. Why choose imperative? At least I can record, validate, and version control a declarative solution. And imperative process is nice for exploration and one-off needs, but... I don't know when I'd really need that or when that's a bottleneck for me.
And I get that this is probably more of a tool for agents than humans, despite that agents are only mentioned in passing. But that's even more concerning in a way. I'm not yet comfortable with giving them tools like this.
Sign in to your Stripe account. Associate your existing provider account (or create a new one) with stripe projects link. Add a payment method with stripe projects billing add. Start the agent session.
This is a note in their docs. I think there still needs a better way for autonomous agents.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkauflin/2026/03/17/why-an-u...
(TLDR Stripe's valuation [$159B] is ~5x Adyen's [which is public, allowing for use as a comp] for somewhat similar payment volumes [$1.9T vs $1.6T, respectively], so Stripe is trying to grow into the valuation current fundamentals do not support)
Avoid.
Cloudflare, GitHub (if they shipped more), Anthropic and OpenAI are also in decent positions to do this.
I wrote notes on this previously [1]. If you believe agents are going to be big consumers, it's helpful to make things that today allow users of agents to easily discover and purchase services via apis.
I don't want to use a terminal, we should be moving away from this.
I really hope this becomes just a button or a mobile app instead and not have to keep using terminals all the time.
This is my gut reaction and subject to change but...
I say this as someone who uses Stripe heavily and would 100% use them as my "financial provider" (or whatever you'd call the funding source in this system), but owned by them? Ehh, feels way too dangerous to build on top of. I wouldn't trust anyone to be the sole owner of it, I wouldn't want to build my business on top it.
Yes, I build on top of Stripe currently and think they are the best developer experience by far and I've found their costs acceptable for what they've allowed me to build without worrying about the financial side. But, I could switch away from them if they blocked me or I found a better alternative. Making my whole business dependent on them? That's a lot scarier. It's the same reason I didn't use Atlas, even though it would have made things simpler.
Stripe has the incentive to add platforms that use Stripe as a payment processor so they can cash on the payment fees, they don't really have any incentive to add a platform that doesn't bring money to them (except affiliates are possible with this)
But what it seems to be is just a fast way to deploy resources to platform providers that use Stripe to bill you?
Or maybe the marketing is just confusing?
I don’t think this is for me though. I’m using things like AWS, Azure, and dedicated servers from companies that lease out dedicated servers. For my company Stripe is nothing more than a payment processor.
Am I misunderstanding what this does?
Perhaps. I am asking the lazy web.
EDIT: The linked docs from their blog post point to a login step after you install it. So yeah, signing up for stripe is a prereq.
You would hope that you can set overall and per-integration billing caps on things rather than just "spend any money on my linked credit card" if it's meant for a "humanless" loop to be able to run stuff off.
Then again I also don't see the logic in asking spicy autocomplete to write code or provision services for you either.
Maybe I'm just not the target market. I guess if you're spinning up 5 new toy todo list apps a week to show off how well you can talk to a predictive text engine maybe this is actually useful.
When your application runs on VMs you control and just uses a payment gateway and an email gateway it's hardly a challenge to get the services setup.
I'm excited to try Stripe Projects, but the thing I'm kind of dreading is the need for multiple providers. If I want auth, a database, and a front end, I'm using Supabase and Vercel, for instance. I don't blame Stripe for this - that's just where we're at right now, with everyone unbundling platforms over the past decade. I think platforms will be back in style soon enough.
> Maybe time for their own .stripe TLD or something
How about subdomains? Free and widely supported already, won't confuse anyone either.
