The biggest downside (imo) of the Stripe approach is that you either have to store them as strings, which isn't great, or strip/prepend in your API layer.

So I made a new thing called UPID. It's most similar to ULID, as it includes a time-component (but with lower precision) and also encodes to a base32 alphabet. But it also includes a 20-bit prefix (allowing four characters). So it can be stored as a UUID or anywhere a 128-bit blob goes, and it always knows what its prefix is because it's baked in.

I've made implementations for Python, Rust and TypeScript, as well as a Postgres extension (with a upid datatype). Mentioned it a few weeks ago in a HN discussion and people seemed pretty interested so thought I'd post it as a submission.

In Rust it looks like this:

  use upid::Upid;
  Upid::new("post"); // post_2acqyme2ygscyguveuhj5a

Repo (Python, Rust, Postgres): https://github.com/carderne/upid

TypeScript: https://github.com/carderne/upid-ts

Demo site: https://upid.rdrn.me/