The API supports idempotency for safely retrying requests without accidentally performing the same operation twice. When creating or updating an object, use an idempotency key. Then, if a connection error occurs, you can safely repeat the request without risk of creating a second object or performing the update twice.

To perform an idempotent request, provide an additional IdempotencyKey element to the request options.

Stripe’s idempotency works by saving the resulting status code and body of the first request made for any given idempotency key, regardless of whether it succeeds or fails. Subsequent requests with the same key return the same result, including 500 errors.

A client generates an idempotency key, which is a unique key that the server uses to recognize subsequent retries of the same request. How you create unique keys is up to you, but we suggest using V4 UUIDs, or another random string with enough entropy to avoid collisions. Idempotency keys are up to 255 characters long.

You can remove keys from the system automatically after they’re at least 24 hours old. We generate a new request if a key is reused after the original is pruned. The idempotency layer compares incoming parameters to those of the original request and errors if they’re the same to prevent accidental misuse.

We save results only after the execution of an endpoint begins. If incoming parameters fail validation, or the request conflicts with another request that’s executing concurrently, we don’t save the idempotent result because no API endpoint initiates the execution. You can retry these requests. Learn more about when you can retry idempotent requests.

All POST requests accept idempotency keys. Don’t send idempotency keys in GET and DELETE requests because it has no effect. These requests are idempotent by definition.

Updateable Stripe objects—including Account, Charge, Customer, PaymentIntent, Refund, Subscription, and Transfer have a metadata parameter. You can use this parameter to attach key-value data to these Stripe objects.

You can specify up to 50 keys, with key names up to 40 characters long and values up to 500 characters long.

You can use metadata to store additional, structured information on an object. For example, you could store your user’s full name and corresponding unique identifier from your system on a Stripe Customer object. Stripe doesn’t use metadata—for example, we don’t use it to authorize or decline a charge and it won’t be seen by your users unless you choose to show it to them.

Some of the objects listed above also support a description parameter. You can use the description parameter to annotate a charge-for example, a human-readable description such as 2 shirts for test@example.com. Unlike metadata, description is a single string, which your users might see (for example, in email receipts Stripe sends on your behalf).

Don’t store any sensitive information (bank account numbers, card details, and so on) as metadata or in the description parameter.

• Related guide: Metadata

Sample metadata use cases

• Link IDs: Attach your system’s unique IDs to a Stripe object to simplify lookups. For example, add your order number to a charge, your user ID to a customer or recipient, or a unique receipt number to a transfer.
• Refund papertrails: Store information about the reason for a refund and the individual responsible for its creation.
• Customer details: Annotate a customer by storing an internal ID for your future use.

All top-level API resources have support for bulk fetches through “list” API methods. For example, you can list charges, list customers, and list invoices. These list API methods share a common structure and accept, at a minimum, the following three parameters: limit, starting_after, and ending_before.

Stripe’s list API methods use cursor-based pagination through the starting_after and ending_before parameters. Both parameters accept an existing object ID value (see below) and return objects in reverse chronological order. The ending_before parameter returns objects listed before the named object. The starting_after parameter returns objects listed after the named object. These parameters are mutually exclusive. You can use either the starting_after or ending_before parameter, but not both simultaneously.

Our client libraries offer auto-pagination helpers to traverse all pages of a list.

Some top-level API resource have support for retrieval via “search” API methods. For example, you can search charges, search customers, and search subscriptions.

Stripe’s search API methods utilize cursor-based pagination via the page request parameter and next_page response parameter. For example, if you make a search request and receive "next_page": "pagination_key" in the response, your subsequent call can include page=pagination_key to fetch the next page of results.

Our client libraries offer auto-pagination helpers to easily traverse all pages of a search result.

Our libraries support auto-pagination. This feature allows you to easily iterate through large lists of resources without having to manually perform the requests to fetch subsequent pages.