Paddle buying ProfitWell is big. Paddle would also take over all my billing support. I don’t want to do a billing migration right now but if I did I probably would switch to Paddle.
The first real contender to Stripe in a long time.
The first real contender to Stripe in a long time.
Gumroad is another merchant of records, but developer documentation is worse, fees are higher and it seems to support only USD pricing.
Other alternatives requires a somewhat hefty monthly fee, which is a non starter for my use case.
Something about Paddle that I can't define is putting me off, whether it is website, wording, attitude, "contact me for the quote" and such things makes it feel old school and bureaucratic. I learned over time to listen to my gut feeling, so I'm not gonna use it.
Gumroad looks much more relaxed, although more expensive and lacks many features.
Here in this thread, someone mentioned https://www.getrevin.com, which lets you use Stripe and provides a tax shield merchant of record for 1% on top of Stripe fees, which makes it interesting.
I also found out https://www.lemonsqueezy.com which is priced similarly to Gumroad, but it lacks documentation to be able to compare it.
Disclaimer: I'm joining Stripe in a month :)
As a dev I thought maybe easier integration. But it doesn't seem all that different from Stripe Invoice.
I also believe that an awful lot of small online SASS and digital good sales by companies are committing (unintentional) tax fraud in the countries of their customers.
I hate trying to understand vat/sales tax on digital goods, to the point that it has until now discouraged me from starting that sort of business on my own. With Paddle I wouldn't have to even think about it.
The funniest thing is that the EU ostensibly did it to make "Amazon pay their fair share" while most small merchants that used to run e-commerce have moved to sell on Amazon or eBay just not to have to keep up with all the regulations and bs.
Cookie law is "simple", but what does it achieve? How are our lives better after knowing that every website uses cookies? Is there any website you thought "oh wow, they are telling me they are using cookies, this totally changes my perception of how they operate!"?
GDPR is the same: did it make any difference in the amount of surveillance capitalism we are subject to? No! Did it make any of the sites you use to reduce the amount of data collected? No! Did it make money for a fuckton of lawyers who went after Small/Medium Businesses who had a website and had no idea if they were complying or not, leading the majority of them to just close down and move to Facebook Pages? Of course it did!
It's akin to saying that assault is now okay because the people are being forced to sign consent forms before getting punched in the face.
“Simply change your entire business model or build a different product”
> Another thing I used to do was to just sell to everyone except European customers
“Just ignore the entire EU market for whatever you’re selling”
This isn’t a serious post right? Or I guess, it’s actually a classic HN counter-post.
You still have to know and understand your legal/tax responsibilities when selling to businesses in Singapore, South Korea, Australia etc.
(B2B Saas founder here)
People often ask me why PartsBox doesn't offer inexpensive B2C plans to hobbyists and I have to explain that it would not make business sense: the costs of dealing with the idiotic EU VAT MOSS rules would exceed the revenue from subscriptions. Plus it would take a significant amount of time, effort and maintenance to support, thus presenting opportunity costs.
If you run a B2B business, things are reasonably straightforward (although still far from obvious), but B2C is a nightmare in the EU (as a side note, I have no idea how people expect to run sustainable small B2C businesses, this is really difficult).
Also, Paddle might be the only reasonable solution, because they do the invoicing themselves. If you can accept that your customers will be getting invoices from someone else, this simplifies things a lot. There is no company that does invoicing for your SaaS correctly if you are based in some EU countries, even though many claim to do so.
That said their API is very basic and their UX is not on par with what you can. A lot of operations are not possible (eg. Letting users change their billing details, such as company or personal, vat number, etc)
They also won't migrate your credit card data if you're too small.
www.getrevin.com looks like a much better alternative: they basically create a stripe account and add you to it. You integrate with your their stripe account and they pay you, same as paddle.