Stripe Projects: Provision and manage services from the CLI
Set up hosting, databases, auth, AI, observability, analytics, and more from the CLI. Stripe Projects gives developers and coding agents a reliable way to provision real services, manage credentials, and keep track of usage across the stack.
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
That last part struck me as well. I don't want an imperative solution, but... I'm not sure if that's just me.
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.
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:
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
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.
product ideas for ai agents: aggregators for apis agents are hobbled by web search but signing up for lots of apis and managing them all is annoying 1) needs to be a way to give your agent a budget to sign up for apis 2) needs to be a way for agents to find apis that are agent
piinbinary
