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Comment by jtolmar | Hacker News Reader

In #4 the author suggests using a service like Paddle to outsource billing. Does anyone here have experience they can share to compare this against Stripe? Other services?

It's hard to know how cumbersome any of these products are in practice when their documentation is an endless series of quick start guides that leave critical details as links to other quick start guides. "Set up a monthly subscription service in 5 minutes! Please refer to these three other guides if you want to know which customers have active subscriptions."

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Stripe is just payment processor. Paddle is similar to Gumroad they become reseller of your producs. You get payed once month (you give them invoice basically) and you dont have to care about invoicing. Your customers get invoice from paddle. It is for digital products only the system cant be used with anything that you ship.

Paddle also takes care of figuring out VAT for you which is a headache if you are based in EU.

I guess to some people 2% more might be worth using Stripe (stripe is 3% paddle is 5%) but for smaller players it solves real problems.

Not only that, but how do you know you are correctly invoicing and declaring sales tax in South Africa, Canada, Russia or South Korea. Using Paddle or FastSpring (worked with them for the last 4 years) makes it their problem and you can relax. Simply raise your prices by 2% and never think about the extra fee again. Well worth it!

I would go even further. Selling globally and just using Stripe almost by definition makes you a small criminal in a whole bunch of countries as it is simply impossible (let alone knowing all the rules!) to file taxes correctly in each country you do business (in the local language!). Outsource it and forget about it! 2% is damn cheap!

Good points. I had some pains explaining how it works to local tax authorities but you do it only once.

Do you own the customer relationship and data when you use them though?

How hard is it to transition out of Paddle?

Well in essence it works just like any other payment processor it just does more as a bonus.

Transitioning to Stripe would mean adding invoicing/billing that also takes care of figuring out VAT and having support around it. When you have fulltime accountant it probably does make sense do it all by yoirself.

My concern with #4 would be with this:

"You don’t have to fight back against chargebacks, they do that for you;"

No way would I delegate this customer satisfaction issue to another company to handle; much less one who doesn't want chargebacks (at any cost.)

I don't have direct experience with Paddle so I don't know whether it's that black and white. Having however experienced a months-long hold on our payment processor account at one point because of an abnormally large charge (a fairly large customer that wanted to pay annually by credit card), I think it could be worth leaving that kind of hassle to somebody else, and have that somebody else be a bigger player that more likely has a better relationship with their payment processors.

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