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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

Switched to Paddle earlier this year for other reasons, glad I'm not affected by this. Paddle is not as pleasant to work with as Stripe from a dev perspective but it also handles so much more that what I need to integrate is tiny compared to Stripe.

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We tried to use Paddle for our company but back when we were trialling them they didn't even have a dev environment (their suggestion was to create free products in production mode and use those to test dev/staging).

At that point I nope'd out of there and moved to Stripe.

Looks like they do now have a separate sandbox system similar to other payment services.

https://developer.paddle.com/getting-started/c052e9e8d265f-w...

But elsewhere they also still seem to recommend doing things involving your production site for testing purposes. That seems like it's probably a bad idea that could be risky if anything goes wrong and possibly mess up things like reporting and compliance even if everything "works".

I've been using their sandbox environment quite successfully for the last few months. Their main competitor, FastSpring, doesn't have a sandbox yet.

There's another interesting competitor that uses Stripe: https://getrevin.com. Their pricing is cheaper than Paddle, making them the cheapest I've seen so far. Not sure if they're any good, though.

Just looked at fastspring. Their pricing page is horrendous: https://fastspring.com/pricing/

I want to get some idea of how much it's going to cost but they dance around the issue completely.

All they do is recommend jumping on a call, which judging by the language on their site, will sound alot like talking to a stereotypical used car salesman.

If it goes down though, you're up s's creek without Paddle ;)

We're switching ACH to Dwolla since it's far cheaper. The 1.25% for the new ACH 2.0 for faster payouts (which we require) is outrageously priced. It basically cut our revenue in half overnight once we got out of the beta for it.

Paddle's API is pretty poor (you can't GET a subscription and see when it expires!?? only available via a once-only webhook). But worth it for the merchant-of-record thing Stripe refuses to do.

Oh that is rough! It looks they do offer you historic events on a different endpoint but it's curious that every endpoint seems to be a POST

https://developer.paddle.com/api-reference/7695d655c158b-get...

Looks expensive, though. 5% + 50¢

They also do more AFAIK.

They offer merchant of record services, which essentially means you can sell worldwide without worrying about tax issues.

I have contemplated Stripe vs Paddle couple of months ago. But ultimately chose to stay with Stripe and deal with tax complexities when there is sizable revenue.

It costs real money to provide real support.

For those CTOs in the back: YOU NEED TO PAY REAL MONEY TO GET REAL SERVICE.

Except the extra cost here is on the wrong side of the equation: it's on the variable side.

So yes, CTO's should "pay real money to get real support," but that only makes sense if the costs don't scale with every dollar of revenue.

A 5% fee is basically impossible to pay for anything that's not software (90%+) margins. Ecommerce, for example, has about 5%-10% net margins. 2%, net, extra payment processing fees is huge.

To be fair Paddle explicitly says that they are a payment solutions platform for SaaS companies

Not really. It's an apples to oranges comparison.

For one thing Paddle is a merchant of record so it's more like "outsource your entire payment system including all the processing of different payment methods and the global tax admin". For a lot of businesses, particularly smaller ones with international sales, that is going to be an attractive option compared to services like Stripe even at this price point.

For another thing Stripe has introduced so many extras that bump up their cut now that some types of business will end up paying quite a bit more than the analogous headline rate. So even if it were an apples to apples comparison the difference on the bottom line still wouldn't be as wide as it might first appear for those merchants.

Thanks for the explanation, I missed the tax and other benefits at first glance. I don't have those tax complications personally but I do see the value now.

Having a checkout bundled with paypal/apple pay/card is pretty compelling however.

Just curious, how don't you have those tax complications?

I'm referring to the international sales. We only sell within the US, state taxes are relatively easy

You must have quite the setup to calculate state, county, and local taxes.

Most online sellers don't have to handle that themselves, whether they're selling physical goods (your shopping cart like Shopify or WooCommerce will do all the sales tax calculations), or services (most locales don't tax them, and you have to get pretty big to worry about establishing economic nexus in places that do).

Not selling internationally perhaps? If you're only selling to customers in the same place then taxes are often much simpler. You might even be exempt from your country's whole sales tax system until you're big enough to cross a threshold.

Wanted to jump on this thread as I actually work in this space and wanted to clear some things up. Another thing with tax solutions added to your stack, is that they purely calculate what you owe, leaving you liable incase there is a miscalculation. Its still up to you to pay this to the relevant authorities.

Paddle handle it all + take full liability. Shoot me a email nick.read @paddle.com if you want a little more info :)

Heard lots of similar stories i.e. for small businesses who can live without stripe's cool APIs, paddle is the way to go to avoid vat/gst/sales tax compliance headache

the type of payment service they offer (merchant of record) is very underappreciated.

Paddle is a bit of a joke tbh, you can’t even create a coupon for a subscription with a trial

They also randomly removed domain approval for some days without even sending any notification

They will also take you VAT if user inputs his VAT number but you have “VAT included in price” option enabled

I'm sure Paddle uses Stripe under the hood though

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