📝 Information about Stripe as an organization can be found - here.
📝 Documentation on Stripe pricing can be found - here.
📝 Documentation on Stripe's Marketplace/Platform product, Stripe Connect, can be found - here.
📖 This lesson's lecture slides can be found - here.

It's finally time we talk about payments! The business model of the TinyHouse platform is an online marketplace where users can host and book listings. When a booking is made, the user that is making the booking (i.e. the tenant) needs to pay the owner of the listing (i.e. the host) a sum of money. TinyHouse (i.e. we) will take a percentage of that transaction as revenue (a.k.a. a platform fee).

Building and integrating a payment infrastructure on top of an app is extremely complex. Do we want our users to be able to pay by debit card? Well, we'll pretty much need to work with every single bank in the country that our platform will be operating in. Do we want our users to be able to pay by credit card? Again, we'll need to work with tools provided to us from credit card companies that we would want to support (VISA, Mastercard, AMEX, etc.). Do we want to accept international payments? Going international is another avenue of difficulty.

If we were to go through the approach of building our own custom payment infrastructure, we'll need to work with all these different parties. This will be extremely time-consuming and probably more complex than the actual app we're building. Not to mention, depending on where our app operates, there are strict laws and regulations on services that deal with the transfer of money.

This is where a third-party payment processor comes in. Companies like Stripe and PayPal specializes in payments. In this course, we'll be using Stripe to facilitate payments for our TinyHouse application.

Stripe#

Stripe is a technology company that helps builds infrastructure where online businesses, like TinyHouse, can accept payments online. Stripe removes the complexity of dealing with finances and payments by working with various financial institutions, regulators, payment networks, and banks so businesses like ourselves don't have to.

A remarkable number of companies use and utilize Stripe - millions in fact and over 120 countries. This consists of small businesses as well as million to billion dollar organizations like Amazon, Google, Shopify, Microsoft, etc.

Note: For more details on Stripe as a company, be sure to check out the about section of Stripe's documentation - https://stripe.com/about.