How products and prices work

Products and prices are core resources for many Stripe integrations. Products define what your business offers, whether that’s goods or services. Prices define how much and how often to charge for products.

You can create products and prices in Stripe or import them into Stripe through the API. After you create products and prices, you can use them with Checkout Sessions, Payment Links, Invoices, Quotes, or a custom integration to create Subscriptions.

Products

Products describe the specific goods or services you offer to your customers.

• If you’re an e-commerce store selling clothing, one of your products might be a large white t-shirt. In Stripe, you can create a separate product for each size and color combination.
• If you’re a SaaS platform, you might have basic and premium pricing tiers. In this case, both basic and premium are separate products because they typically offer unique attributes or features.
• If you’re a donation platform that accepts donations for several different causes, each cause is a different product.

Each product has a unique ID. Unlike most Stripe resources, you can choose the ID of the product yourself. We recommend choosing an ID that makes it easy to integrate Stripe with other systems you use. For example, if you’re selling physical goods, you can use the internal ID from your own systems.

When you create a product in Stripe, you have to provide a name. You can optionally add other attributes, like a description or image. If you’re using Stripe Tax, you can also define a tax code for each product, such as pet grooming, e-books, or SaaS. Stripe Tax uses the tax code to automatically calculate and collect sales taxes during purchase.

Prices

In Stripe, price objects are more than a numerical amount to pay. Prices include additional information, such as tax behavior, volume tiers, and recurrence intervals for subscriptions. You don’t need to create new prices for each purchase–if you’re selling a product for one price, you only need to create one price. You can also make this price the default price for the product.

Prices can either be one-time or recurring. Subscriptions use recurring prices to charge the customer at an interval, such as “once a month.” If you sell the same service at several different subscription intervals, it’s best to create multiple recurring prices for the same product. Learn more about pricing models.

A single Price can support multiple currencies. For example, if you sell a product in the USA for 10 USD, Europe for 9 EUR, and Japan for 1300 JPY, the same Price object can cover all three currencies. Each purchase uses one of the Price’s supported currencies, depending on how you use the Price in your integration. Learn more about multi-currency Prices.

Because a product can have multiple prices associated with it, you’ll need to specify which price to use when creating Checkout Sessions, Payment Links, Invoices, Quotes, or Subscriptions.

Most prices define a fixed unit_amount, but you can also configure the price to function with different tiers or usage-based models. Learn more about tiered pricing and usage-based pricing.

If you’re using Stripe Tax, you can specify the tax_behavior for the price to determine whether the tax is already included in the amount, or if it needs to be added. Learn more about tax behavior.

Working with products and prices

Create or import products and prices

The quickest way to get started with products and prices is to create them through the Stripe Dashboard.

If you have a large product catalog that you manage using a spreadsheet or other software, you might prefer to import the product catalog programmatically using the Products and Prices API. Learn more about import products and prices.

If you need to charge an amount of money that’s different for each transaction (for example, a user-selected donation amount), you can create the product, but not create a price. Instead, you can use the price_data parameter when creating Checkout Sessions or Subscriptions to set the particular price.

Use products and prices

Manage existing products and prices

You can update product details through the Dashboard or API. For example, you might change the description of a product, or add new product images to use on the Checkout page.

If you’re no longer selling a product, you can archive both it and the price through the Dashboard by clicking the Archive button, or through the API by setting active to false. We store the archived product and price information indefinitely to maintain records of past transactions.

In general, you can’t delete products or prices, you can only archive them. In certain cases, you can use the Dashboard to delete a price that has never been used, or to delete a product that doesn’t have any prices set.

To change the price of a product, create a new price for the new amount, then archive the existing price by setting active to false. Instead of changing the unit_amount on the existing price, you need to create a new price to make sure that we keep the existing price as an immutable record of past transactions.

You can set a default price on a product to specify the most common price to present to customers. You can change the default price to another price later, such as if you increase the price of your product.

Understand product and price compatibility

Not all features of products and prices are compatible with all Stripe APIs. Consult the following table for compatibility information.

Understand limitations

We don’t limit the number of customers, coupons, products, prices, or most other objects that you can create in your Stripe account.

When using recurring prices with Subscriptions:

• All prices on a Subscription must have the same recurring.interval and recurring.interval_count
• The maximum interval time period of a price is 3 years