How to get Stripe sales notifications on your Mac

It's 11:40 on a Tuesday, you shipped a pricing change last night, and you've opened the Stripe dashboard six times since breakfast. Each time: same numbers, lost focus. You don't need a dashboard; you need to be told when something happens.

Here are four ways to get a Stripe sale onto your Mac, from free and noisy to quiet and glanceable.

1. Stripe's own email notifications

In the Stripe dashboard, open your profile's communication preferences and turn on emails for successful payments. It's free and takes a minute.

• Good: nothing to install, works everywhere.
• Not so good: an inbox is the wrong place for a signal you want in seconds. Mail batching, filters and Focus modes all delay it, and it trains you to keep checking email.

2. A webhook into Slack or Discord

Point a Stripe webhook for checkout.session.completed or invoice.paid at a small function that posts to a channel. Many no-code tools do this without code.

• Good: your team sees sales too, and you can format the message however you like.
• Not so good: you now own a server or a paid automation, and a chat app is one more window competing for your attention.

3. A menu bar app

Several Mac apps poll Stripe and put a number in the menu bar. They're tidy, but on a MacBook with a notch the menu bar is already crowded, and icons on the right get hidden behind the notch when there are too many.

4. The notch itself

The notch is the one part of the screen you never put a window over. NotchBuddy uses it: when a payment lands, a small pill drops out of the notch with the amount, you hear a cha-ching, and a little pet jumps. Hover and you see today's takings, MRR and the latest payments.

Setting it up with a read-only key

1. Create a restricted key

   In Stripe, open Developers → API keys → Create restricted key.

2. Give it read access only

   Set Events and Subscriptions to Read. Leave everything else as None.

3. Paste it into NotchBuddy

   Revenue → Stripe → paste the rk_live_… key. It's saved in your Mac's Keychain and only ever sent to api.stripe.com.

Which one should you use?

If you sell through more than Stripe, the notch approach scales: NotchBuddy also connects RevenueCat, Lemon Squeezy, Polar, Paddle, Dodo Payments, Gumroad and App Store Connect, all with read-only keys.

Test it before a real sale

Create a restricted key in Stripe's test mode (rk_test_…), connect it, and make a test payment with one of Stripe's test cards. You'll hear the cha-ching and see the pill without waiting for a customer. Swap in the live key when you're happy.