Ask HN: SaaS operators, who do you use for payments? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: SaaS operators, who do you use for payments?

26 points0des14 comments

Last thread got almost no responses, but I'm just as curious, if not more. Surely someone has some testimonials or recommendations or anecdotes from their own experience!

What I'm looking for from this thread: someone comments about their payment processor experience and chimes in with something like "hey I built a thing, and here's what I really like about the folks I use, for reasons A, B, and C." or even someone who has something like "I used processor A, but this thing happened and I ended up switching to processor B"

Valuable info for me to know would be:

- Average processing volume per month

- Average transaction total

- Price of the most expensive item you sell

- Price of the least expensive item you sell

I've tried querying a few search engines, but all the results I've found contain some form of affiliate marketing, link codes, and things that in general make me disregard the sincerity of the testimonial.

I use https://paddle.com/ for a paid Chrome extension (https://www.checkbot.io/).

The major reason I use Paddle over Stripe is Paddle deal with all EU VAT and other country specific tax + admin for you which Stripe still don't (as far as I know). If you're a small team or solo, you really don't want to be burdened with the extra work here and the scope for complicated and scary tax related mistakes.

Each month Paddle send me a single payment and I record those as business income - that's it, done.

Edit: Pricing is 5% + $0.50 per transaction. As far as I know, Fastspring is more expensive and Gumroad is cheaper, and both take care of tax for you the same as Paddle.

Sean, thanks for the reply. I think we might be in the same boat here, if I am understanding you right. To clarify: Are you saying that you are in the EU, or your service is based in EU, or are you saying that your customers are in the EU?

EDIT: Currently browsing Paddle.com where I clicked the "Explore Paddle" link, which 404's for me here https://paddle.com/demo/explore-paddle/ (fails with the error 'We can’t connect to the server at fast.wistia.com.') https://paddle.com/resources/revenue-delivery-explained/ (also down for the same reason, wistia)

I also clicked the "Sales Questions" button, in an attempt to notify, but it appears that button doesn't lead me anywhere.

Can anybody verify if those two items function for them?

I'm based in the UK, selling worldwide (with some exceptions https://paddle.com/support/countries-supported/).

Even before Brexit, if you wanted to sell digital goods to EU countries, you had to charge each country different VAT rates, register for VAT collection etc. Other countries have their own tax rules and other obligations too. Paddle lets me ignore all the admin for this which is awesome.

Does anyone know what you would do if you sold a product worldwide for a year while ignoring all this? Would you be in a real mess?

We have a saying in Germany for this called „Wo kein Kläger, da kein Richter“ roughly translated „no plaintiff, no judge“. I think it highly depends on how much you’re actually selling, if you’re only within the free limits or just marginal above I’d say nobody cares (for the EU at least).

I’d not recommend it because the tax office knows no mercy, better to go with a merchant of record.

Do check Chargebee(https://www.chargebee.com/) * Subscriptions and recurring billing management. * Billing automation * Accounting and taxes * SaaS business metrics reporting

do check https://www.chargebee.com/launch/ if you are new and planning to launch a new business.

[edit]-added a relevant link

I’ve used Stripe in the past and it was a joy to use. Used it for an simple online shop selling shirts.

In my case I only sold to one country within the EU which is my home country and therefore I didn’t have any problems with EU taxes and stuff like that. If you plan to sell in the EU from outside or to multiple EU countries I’d strongly recommend a merchant of record.

The most known I think is Paddle, as also mentioned in this thread. But their pricing is hidden deep inside their ToS and in general you don’t get that many information just from the website, best to contact their sales department and check with them if they would like to onboard you. But it’s definitely more expensive than Stripe for fees but in my opinion you’ll save that money in accounting as you only get one invoice per month and don’t have to worry about taxes in X countries.

Also a small tip, check if your country has laws on “fake self-employment” (Scheinselbständigkeit in German) because I know for a fact that some (at least German) finance authorities don’t understand how a merchant of record works because even though you have multiple customers, on the paper you only have one, Paddle.

I don't think "bogus self-employment" applies here. If you're a company that contracts people instead of hire them as employees you might have troubles, but not the other way around.

I can only speak for Germany and from my experience. Their argument was that you only have „one“ customer and therefor should be employed by, in this case, Paddle.

Edit: Should mention it was for a kind of SaaS, the case may be different if you sell physical products online.

Well, I guess it's quite similar where I'm from (in EU) where it depends if you're an individual or have an LLC like form of organization.

Even if you're sole proprietorship there are a things to happen to risk being classified as employee, like not setting your own working hours, working with company tools, not being able to sell to other clients (of course you can do that) and so on.

I really doubt it's an issue with Paddle, they have lots of german customers.

I use Paddle but most people use Stripe.

Awesome, thanks for chiming in! Just curious what made you choose paddle, and also, can you mention some rough numbers on what's the cheapest thing you sell, whats the most expensive thing you sell, and what the dev experience has been like integrating it?

Wise (nee transferwise) for big payments in foreign currencies.

Stripe but most of my customers don't use it unless they want to pay by credit card.

Everybody else direct bank deposit. Xero does all the payment matching although that semi manual process likely wouldn't scale into thousands of customers.

Im not currently using it, but i had great experiences with mollie (https://www.mollie.com/).

Awesome thanks for adding that one. May I ask if you left for another processor or was there no longer a need for processing?

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