Stripe Through the Lens of API Evangelist

I have been reviewing API providers for the better part of fifteen years, and Stripe has been on every short list of provider operations I have pointed at as the bar. I have not actually sat down and walked their developer area end-to-end in a while — homepage to docs to GitHub to pricing — and I wanted to do that fresh, the way a developer arriving at stripe.com for the first time in 2026 would. This is what I found.