Stripe Projects: Provision and manage services from the CLI

I built Chroma's integration for Stripe Projects. Took two or three days to get it integrated and live.

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

Creating accounts and managing billing across multiple platforms is a real pain. This is a good solution, but I’m wondering if this should be more like an open standard that platforms implement, with Stripe providing a way for platforms to charge and optionally for users to pay (in addition to credit cards, wallets like Tempo, etc)

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

I think there is still room, since, as I understand it, I do not want coding agents to use the same account that I end up using. I understand that some users may not care, but I think agents should have their own accounts and the ability to create their own accounts and use services like Vercel, Supabase, etc.

Sadly it doesn’t seem to do anything innovative to protect your api keys from getting exfiltrated by tricking the AI. Looks like they are stored in an ordinary config file:

https://docs.stripe.com/stripe-cli/keys

I think this is a really cool idea that I hope doesn't work out. I agree with others in this thread that is should be based on an open protocol, not bound up in Stripe.

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.

I personally think stuff like this should be made as protocols and done in the open instead

I think this is smart and very interesting. I see it like an aggregator marketplace. A powerful position to be in.

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.

[1]: https://x.com/chrisbarber/status/2026331038994321898

Hi there! Developer at Supabase here. I'm happy to finally see live what I've been working on for the last two months. I'm excited to see that Stripe users can finally use Supabase services in a seamless way. For new Supabase users, there is no need to leave the CLI. One command, and you'll have a brand new Supabase account, including a new Supabase resource provisioned just for you. This means that you'll be able to not only use a PG database from the get-go, but it also comes with Storage and Authentication for free. I'm really excited to finally see this project come to light. More to come!

Can someone enlighten me how exactly an AI agent will signup for a service like Stripe without going through the standard KYC process when opening an account?

Am I misunderstanding what this does?

Perhaps. I am asking the lazy web.

Nice idea, but I'd love a more open approach to this (or more support for OpenTofu / Terraform). This is just another vendor-locked-in way and might only work with selected platforms.

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)

You know who is completely missing the boat on solving this problem? Heroku. I guess I should say Salesforce. It's pretty amazing though - they used to be the default "deploy this shit I just wrote" choice.

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.

Associated blog post: https://stripe.dev/blog/production-ready-dev-stack-from-term...

Why does this need to be a CLI?

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.

In the era of enshittification I can't really see the logic in tying a bunch of your infrastructure/services to the likes of stripe.

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.

Aside: did they really need to use that generic projects.dev domain? Maybe time for their own .stripe TLD or something