So, back in March 2018, Stripe bought up Index.com, a point-of-sale credit card terminal company claiming one-second chip card transactions. Other than the initial announcement, it was radio-silence. It was possible that this was just another Silicon Valley Acqui-hire, where a big company buys a small company for its team, not its product, and the product gets scrapped. But then September 17, 2018, someone posts a link on Hacker News entitled Stripe Terminal.
It promised to be like the rest of the Stripe developer experience, but with physical hardware. The pricing is also straight-forward, and lower than for online payments (given the lower risk of in-store payments, they are generally cheaper than online payments.) They offered two terminals, a BBPOS Chipper for $59 or a Verifone P400 for $299. The BBPOS Chipper currently only works with iOS devices using a native SDK. The Verifone P400 is currently available as a web-connected device that can be controlled via JavaScript. Given that my application is a cloud-based application, the JavaScript SDK with the Verifone P400 was the logical choice.
At the point I saw the post (and still as of this writing), the program is invite only. I filled out the form asking for an invite. I wasn’t expecting to get an invite quickly, since I’m relatively insignificant developer, so I was expecting I’d have to wait months until General Availability. However, just a couple weeks later, I get an e-mail from Stripe with a link to order my developer hardware. The pricing for the dev hardware is the same as for the production kit: $299. I put in an order, and about a week or so later, I get my terminal in the mail.