Developer Tools That Live Where the Work Happens
Stripe’s developer experience team spent the past year interviewing engineers at high-growth companies about how they manage their Stripe API integrations. The recurring theme: developers appreciate the documentation and tooling, but they dislike switching between tabs to debug, monitor, and build. After testing with thousands of users—including teams at Slack and Notion—Stripe is rolling out Workbench, now enabled by default for all new accounts. Existing users can turn it on from the Developer settings in the Dashboard.
Workbench is a Developer-focused surface inside the Dashboard that centralizes integration health, API and event history, prototyping tools, and critical account alerts. It’s accessible from any Dashboard page with a single keystroke, with the aim of reducing context switching and helping developers stay in flow state longer—a goal backed by research from Stack Overflow and DORA on developer efficiency and collaboration.
Inspecting Objects and Testing Requests in Context
API work forces developers to operate across a network boundary, which limits the visibility that local debugging tools provide. Workbench’s Inspector bridges that gap by letting you open any object in the Dashboard—from Customers to Subscriptions—and see how it links to other Stripe objects. You can also inspect the raw JSON and underlying API requests without leaving the page.
When you find a bug, the Shell brings command-line-style prototyping to the browser, allowing you to issue GET, POST, and DELETE requests without writing code. Slack’s staff software engineer Ber Clausen notes that when customer issues surface, his team goes straight to Workbench: “It’s very straightforward to get to the root of the issue, and if it’s not simple, we can interact with Workbench to troubleshoot.”
Error Monitoring and Team Collaboration
A bad deploy can cause an error spike that costs revenue if it isn’t diagnosed quickly. Workbench gives you a layered view of integration health. The Overview page shows API success rate, recent error notifications, and recommended API upgrades. For finer detail, the Errors page rolls up all account activity and highlights failure points, pairing each error with actionable advice, documentation links, and suggested fixes.
Since debugging is rarely a solo activity, Workbench supports shareable deep links to specific views, making it possible to bring a teammate up to speed on a particular issue without a long Slack thread or screen-share session.
Prototyping Against the API Reference
New domains require a mental map of Stripe’s concepts and API semantics. Traditionally, that meant reading the docs and translating the reference into code. Workbench’s API Explorer turns that process into an iterative loop: as you scaffold a request, the Shell shows you the corresponding command, and you can request a complete code sample in your language of choice. The Inspector complements this by letting you observe and trigger state changes for asynchronous, state-based APIs—so you can experiment with a resource while learning its behavior, all in one environment.
What’s Next
Stripe plans to expand Workbench with features aimed at surfacing integration health issues—especially critical failures—and supporting scenario testing with your team. For now, developers can also explore Sandboxes for collaborative testing and Event Destinations to route API events to cloud services. Feedback is being collected through the Stripe Insiders community forum.
