WorkOS joins Stripe Projects: Auth from the CLI, no payment wall
WorkOS is now a supported provider in Stripe Projects. Add enterprise-grade auth to any project from the CLI with a single command — no signup, no payment wall.
WorkOS is officially listed as a provider in Stripe Projects, the new CLI-first workflow that lets developers and AI agents provision hosting, databases, auth, and AI without hitting payment walls. A single command gives you a sandbox environment with API keys synced to your .env file, and our own CLI picks up right where Stripe leaves off.
Starting a new project should feel like writing code, not filling out forms. That's exactly the problem Stripe Projects solves, and we're now officially part of it.
WorkOS is a supported provider in Stripe Projects, sitting alongside the other essential services developers already rely on. You can provision enterprise-grade authentication from the command line in seconds, with no signup flow, no payment wall, and no context switching.
Here's what that looks like in practice, and why we think this changes how developers bootstrap auth.
Ready to try it? The Stripe Projects documentation has everything you need to get started right now!!
What Stripe Projects does
Stripe Projects is a CLI-first workflow for spinning up real infrastructure. Instead of visiting five different dashboards to wire together hosting, a database, auth, and payments, you initialize a project directory and add providers from the terminal. Each provider provisions a real environment — not a mock, not a simulator — and drops the credentials directly into your project.
The key insight: this works for both developers and AI coding agents. When you initialize a Stripe project, it writes structured metadata and coding agent skills into your local directory. Any agent operating in that context — whether it's Cursor, your editor's built-in AI assistant, or something else — can read those skills and understand how to interact with each provider. More on that later.
For developers who've spent the last decade bouncing between documentation tabs to wire up a new stack, this is a concrete workflow shift. You stay in the terminal. Your agents stay informed. Your .env file stays populated.
Prerequisites: Install the Stripe CLI
Before anything else, you need the Stripe CLI installed locally. If you're on macOS with Homebrew, it's one command:
For other platforms and installation methods, check the Stripe CLI install guide.
Once that's in place, initialize a new project:
This creates your project directory with the scaffolding Stripe Projects needs to manage providers, credentials, and agent skills. Everything else builds on top of it.
Add WorkOS to your project
From inside your project directory:
One command. No account creation form, no credit card prompt, no email verification loop.
By default, this provisions a sandbox environment. You get a fully functional WorkOS setup for development and testing — AuthKit, user management, the works. When you're ready to ship to real users, run the same command again and select the production configuration. The flow is identical; only the environment changes.
What lands in your project
After the command completes, your .env file contains two new values:
These are live credentials tied to your WorkOS environment. No copy-pasting from a dashboard. No hunting through settings pages. They're just there, ready for your application code — or your agent — to use.
On pricing
Most developers won't pay WorkOS anything. Our free tier covers up to 1 million monthly active users for authentication and user management. You only start paying when you need enterprise features like SAML SSO, SCIM directory sync, or fine-grained authorization. The Stripe Projects integration doesn't change our pricing model — it just removes the friction of getting started.
The WorkOS CLI handoff
Stripe Projects gets your credentials provisioned and your agent skills written. But configuring auth — setting up redirect URIs, choosing authentication methods, enabling social providers — usually requires more steps.
That's what our own CLI handles. Run:
The WorkOS CLI walks you through the remaining configuration interactively — and because Stripe Projects already synced your API keys to the local environment, the WorkOS CLI picks up exactly where Stripe left off. No re-authentication. No "paste your API key here" step. It reads your .env, recognizes the environment, and continues the setup.
The result is a continuous flow from stripe projects add workos/auth through full auth configuration without ever leaving the terminal and without manually transferring a single credential.
Migrating an existing project
This handoff is useful if you started a side project or prototype with a simpler auth strategy — maybe email/password with a lightweight library, or a basic OAuth wrapper — and now you need something that handles edge cases and scales with your user base. Instead of ripping out your existing implementation and starting from scratch in a dashboard, you can:
The CLI understands your project context and can help you transition to AuthKit incrementally. That's a smoother path than the typical "read the migration guide, rewrite your middleware, hope nothing breaks" approach.
Advanced configuration: ejecting to the dashboard
CLIs and agents handle the common setup tasks, but sometimes you want a visual interface. Maybe you're configuring a complex SAML connection with an enterprise customer's IdP. Maybe you want to review your authentication branding, inspect session policies, or set up fine-grained roles and permissions. That's what the WorkOS Dashboard is for.
Getting there from a Stripe project is one command:
This opens your browser directly into the WorkOS Dashboard, scoped to the environment your project is using. No login hunt, no "which organization was this under again" — just a direct link to the right context.
The CLI-to-dashboard relationship is a spectrum. On one end, you have the fast, automated path: Stripe provisions credentials, the WorkOS CLI configures the basics, agents scaffold the integration. On the other end, full manual control over every setting in the dashboard. You can operate anywhere on that spectrum and move between the two freely.
What this means for the developer workflow
The old way to add auth to a project: visit a provider's website, sign up, verify your email, create an application, copy your credentials, paste them into a .env file, read the quickstart guide, install the SDK, and configure your framework integration. That process typically takes 20–40 minutes — longer if you hit a snag.
The Stripe Projects way: one CLI command to add the provider, one CLI command to configure it, and agent skills that help your coding assistant do the rest. Credentials are synced automatically. Configuration is interactive and contextual. The dashboard is one command away when you need it.
We built WorkOS to remove the complexity of shipping auth. Stripe Projects removes the complexity of getting started. Together, they collapse what used to be a multi-step, multi-tab, multi-form process into a terminal session.
Get started
Install the Stripe CLI, initialize a project, and add WorkOS:
Five commands from zero to a fully configured auth setup. Check the Stripe Projects documentation for the full reference, and the WorkOS CLI changelog for details on what our CLI can configure.
We're excited about where this goes — not just for WorkOS, but for the model of CLI-first, agent-aware infrastructure provisioning. The less time developers spend on setup, the more time they spend building the thing they actually care about.