We hit api.stripe.com from Amsterdam, Montreal, San Francisco and Singapore — 20 times each — and measured how long it actually took. Here's what your users would experience when your app talks to Stripe.
Independent measurement by LatencyRadar. Not affiliated with Stripe.
If you're building a payments integration, this is reassuring news. Stripe's API was fast, reliable, and remarkably consistent in every city we tested. The typical response time was 51 ms globally, and even on a slow request it barely moved. Singapore was surprisingly the fastest — nearly instant at 13 ms. San Francisco was the slowest, but 87 ms on a bad day is still well within what users would consider seamless.
A standard request to Stripe's API from four cities, repeated 20 times each. This is the kind of call your backend makes every time a user checks out — so the speed here directly affects how snappy your payment flow feels.
Fast everywhere, but Singapore stands out. At 13 ms typical, it's nearly 6x faster than the next closest region — which points to Stripe having a major infrastructure presence in Asia. If you're launching in Southeast Asia, your payment flow will feel instant. Montreal, Amsterdam and San Francisco are all well within the 'users won't notice' range.
Singapore led at 13 ms typical with almost no variation — every single request came back in 15 ms or less. Montreal was next at 51 ms, Amsterdam at 70 ms, and San Francisco was slowest at 79 ms typical. The key takeaway: even the slowest region had almost no bad requests. San Francisco's worst case was 90 ms, which is still fast.
Almost none of the time is Stripe's servers thinking — the server response itself is nearly instant everywhere. Most of the time is spent on the connection setup and security handshake before the request even reaches Stripe. That's normal for a well-optimized API, and it means there's not much Stripe could do to make it faster — the remaining time is mostly physics.
Start with the headline number for each city. Open the technical breakdown only if you want to see where that time is coming from.
20 requests · 100% successful
20 requests · 100% successful
20 requests · 100% successful
20 requests · 100% successful
When Stripe is slow, your checkout is slow — and slow checkouts lose sales. The typical response time tells you what most requests look like, but the 'on a bad day' number is what your users experience when things aren't perfect. For Stripe, that number is still fast. But for your own API sitting in front of it, the same question applies: how slow does it get when it's not having a great day?
We made a standard request to api.stripe.com from servers in 4 cities: Amsterdam, Montreal, San Francisco and Singapore. Each city ran 20 requests. We measured how long each step took — DNS lookup, connecting, security handshake, server response, and download — then calculated typical and worst-case times from the results.
Run a free speed test from multiple cities and find out where your users are waiting — no setup, no account required.
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