My understanding from Stripe was that they're stored with the prefix as text in the DB, but I might be wrong. As for doing the translation at the API boundary,

My understanding from Stripe was that they're stored with the prefix as text in the DB, but I might be wrong. As for doing the translation at the API boundary, my only gripe is that it's likely to be error-prone: every dev needs to remember to add/strip the correct prefix in every route. Of course you can add some middleware that is context-aware, but still there will be cases (eg live querying while talking to non-tech team) where not having to translate back-and-forth would be great! Anyway, appreciate the comment and definitely agree that for most teams just using a UUID and adding a bit of code is a more obvious route than using a new ID format someone just made up!