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Comment by going_to_800 | Hacker News Reader

The only problem with services like Paddle is that your customers are not your own anymore technically. The customer will belong now to Paddle and if something happens with Paddle or your account, you'll lose all of them.

PS: We're using Paddle for a few years and we're a bit concerned by this.

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I have users in my database anyway, so in the worst case scenario I can just revert to Chargebee (I will leave the current integration as is just in case, and disable it in favor of Paddle) and ask users to subscribe again without recreating the whole account and without losing any of their data. It's unfortunate to ask users to resubscribe though...

asking users to re-subscribe will lose from 20% to 40% of your customers (my estimation). Unless your SaaS is business critical, a good percentage of customers pay without using or really needing the app so much to re-subscribe.

What is your estimation based on? My users sign up with my app and at the moment a free subscription is created for them automatically on sign up, and they can upgrade to a paid plan from within the app. So I would only ask them to pick a plan again once I switch, not to recreate the whole account. Their account plus data etc would stay the same. Do you think it would still be bad to ask them to pick up a plan again, knowing that the previous subscriptions would be cancelled automatically when they resubscribe? Thanks

You at least get the email address of your customers (unlike say when Google deprecated payments recently with the Chrome Web Store, so it would have been much harder to retain existing customers).

How does this compare to something like Stripe? How would Stripe help you keep them if something happened to Stripe?

Stripe is a payment processor, you have a direct relationship with the customer, on the invoice is written your company details. With Paddle, on the invoice you'll see Paddle company details, all your customers pay Paddle, not your company. You won't have any legal or fiscal relationship with the customer.

> You won't have any legal or fiscal relationship with the customer.

What does that practically mean when running a SaaS though? If Paddle was going away, you for sure have access to your customer email addresses to ask them to resubscribe and Paddle might help you migrate the payment details to another payment provider. How is the situation any easier or better with Stripe?

The Paddle invoice at least has your product/company name + website link on it, along with Paddle's details. It doesn't feel any different to buying e.g. Android, iOS or Steam products to me - I don't see why customers would care who is legally receiving the payment as long as they get their product.

Sometimes customers are confused that they see a charge for PADDLE.NET instead of your company name.

I think it's the same thing with any provider. As long as you have users in your own database, you can just ask them to resubscribe when you switch provider. Not sure if some users would cancel because of this inconvenience.

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