Simple online payments company Stripe quietly launched jQuery.payment, library of code for building credit card forms, validating input, and formatting numbers. It’s basically a library that helps developers build better payment forms, regardless of whether they are using Stripe or another payments platform.
For background, Stripe is a developer-friendly online payments system that allows developers to avoid setting up merchant accounts and dealings with banks, while still ensuring transaction safety. The company competes with the likes of PayPal and Braintree, and is backed by General Catalyst, Sequoia, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Elon Musk.
The library is written in jQuery, the main open-source JavaScript framework, and wraps a bunch of common tasks such as validating card numbers, formatting them properly, showing the card type into a single library. This helps developers adding payments to a website to have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to building these features.
For example, in a credit card form, purchasers can input their credit card number and the form will automatically detect whether the card is a Visa, MasterCard or American Express card. Also, there is an underlying algorithm that will detect right away if someone mistypes a credit card number.
And developers can use the library even if they don’t accept payments via’s Stripe’s platform. The library itself powers Stripe’s new Checkout features, which were launched a few weeks ago.
As more companies switch over to Stripe (i.e. new clients like Squarespace and Mixpanel), the startup is growing fast. We’re told that Stripe is now processing millions of dollars in payments a day. Of course, companies like Braintree and PayPal are also processing millions (and billions) of dollars in transactions but Stripe is new to the scene so it’s impressive to see the startup scale so quickly.