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> I know that Paddle, as a merchant of record, handles tax and several other things, and I like the idea of receiving just one reverse invoice per month which w

> I know that Paddle, as a merchant of record, handles tax and several other things, and I like the idea of receiving just one reverse invoice per month which would make accounting easier too. For what it's worth, I've been using Paddle for a few years for a paid Chrome extension (https://www.checkbot.io/ https://www.checkbot.io/) and it's been that simple for me. I put through the Paddle payments as my income on tax returns and I'm done for admin. Chargebee does seem to have a lot more customer/subscription management features though so I would check Paddle has everything you need there. Fastspring and Gumroad are worth looking at too as they handle VAT as well.

polishdude20 6y ago
We switched to paddle after a week of stripe and realizing we'd have to do taxes ourself. When I asked stripe how we can handle taxes they just told me to use another Saas to do the tax calculating for me. Sure paddle takes away like %10-20 from each payment for their service but it really saves stressing over taxes and other things.
- seanwilson 6y ago
  > When I asked stripe how we can handle taxes they just told me to use another Saas to do the tax calculating for me. Do you know if most people actually do this? I feel like they don't because I hear about Stripe a lot but never how people handle tax. > Sure paddle takes away like %10-20 from each payment for their service but it really saves stressing over taxes and other things. Just to clarify for others, but it used to be 5% + $0.50 for Paddle fees and Paddle take out the country specific tax (which they don't have a choice in) before sending anything to you, leaving you the rest. So payments from e.g. the US to the UK you won't lose anything extra to tax but from EU countries to the UK the VAT ranges from about 15% to 25% depending on the country (and these tax rules are always changing, but Paddle deal with this for you).
  - polishdude20 6y ago
    Not sure if most people do it. I feel like they don't just due to the complexity?
    - seanwilson 6y ago
      It's tax though. They'll get in trouble eventually surely? Having to clean up a tax mess after it's been going on for years (over multiple countries too) is one of my worst nightmares but I feel most people aren't this cautious haha.
      - polishdude20 6y ago
        I'm guessing enough people slip through the cracks :/
        colesantiago 6y ago
        It may be that most users of Stripe: 1. Use another Saas like Quaderno, Taxjar, Octobat or Avalara. 2. Are mostly US based businesses and don't care for EU based taxes. 3. Haven't yet reach the threshold for charging VAT and Stripe on its own.
- SkyLinx 6y ago
  Yeah, taxes is the main hassle I definitely want to avoid.
SkyLinx 6y ago
Thanks, sounds like your experience so far has been positive, right?
- seanwilson 6y ago
  Yep, let me know if you've got any questions. The only bad things I can think of is their API documentation wasn't that clear sometimes (their email support always helped though, and maybe the docs have improved now), their API was missing a few things I expected (like being able to query subscriptions by email address, but maybe that's changed), and they don't have a ton of features compared to say Fastspring (e.g. there's no self-service area where users can view and manage their subscription, but you can get the API to generate a link you can send to a user that lets them cancel their subscription and another link that lets them update their payment details).
  - SkyLinx 6y ago
    Awesome. How do you manage testing considering that they don't have a test environment? Do you test with the same account as production or with a different account created just for testing? Also how quickly do they usually respond when you contact them? Thanks!
    - seanwilson 6y ago
      I just created a separate Paddle account with a different email address for testing. Inside that account, I manually created test versions of each product. In my testing branch, I use the testing product IDs for the checkout. You can also give yourself discount codes that give 100% off to test directly with the production Paddle account, or just refund yourself if you want to test some real payments. Would be nice if they had more testing features build in though. > Also how quickly do they usually respond when you contact them? Usually after one working day (not on weekends).
      - SkyLinx 6y ago
        Do they allow creating accounts just for testing? Would I risk that they close them? One thing that annoys me about the lack of a test environment is also that they allow only one webhook URL per account. I have three environments for my SaaS, dev/staging/prod. So with Chargebee I have the "live site" (as they call it) linked to the prod environment with its own webhook URL. Then I have the "test site" shared between dev and staging. But with Chargebee I can add multiple webhook URLs, so all events get sent to both dev and staging and each environment only cares about its own events. With Paddle, unless I create three accounts for the different environments, I would have to somehow share a webhook URL between at least dev and staging if I create one account for dev/staging and another for production. I guess I could create a simple app that proxies requests to the environments by looking at some string that tells which environment the event is for (I know that Paddle allows you to add a passthrough setting with some custom data - do you know if this persists across all future events for a subscription?)

polishdude20 6y ago

We switched to paddle after a week of stripe and realizing we'd have to do taxes ourself. When I asked stripe how we can handle taxes they just told me to use another Saas to do the tax calculating for me. Sure paddle takes away like %10-20 from each payment for their service but it really saves stressing over taxes and other things.

seanwilson 6y ago
> When I asked stripe how we can handle taxes they just told me to use another Saas to do the tax calculating for me. Do you know if most people actually do this? I feel like they don't because I hear about Stripe a lot but never how people handle tax. > Sure paddle takes away like %10-20 from each payment for their service but it really saves stressing over taxes and other things. Just to clarify for others, but it used to be 5% + $0.50 for Paddle fees and Paddle take out the country specific tax (which they don't have a choice in) before sending anything to you, leaving you the rest. So payments from e.g. the US to the UK you won't lose anything extra to tax but from EU countries to the UK the VAT ranges from about 15% to 25% depending on the country (and these tax rules are always changing, but Paddle deal with this for you).
- polishdude20 6y ago
  Not sure if most people do it. I feel like they don't just due to the complexity?
  - seanwilson 6y ago
    It's tax though. They'll get in trouble eventually surely? Having to clean up a tax mess after it's been going on for years (over multiple countries too) is one of my worst nightmares but I feel most people aren't this cautious haha.
    - polishdude20 6y ago
      I'm guessing enough people slip through the cracks :/
      - colesantiago 6y ago
        It may be that most users of Stripe: 1. Use another Saas like Quaderno, Taxjar, Octobat or Avalara. 2. Are mostly US based businesses and don't care for EU based taxes. 3. Haven't yet reach the threshold for charging VAT and Stripe on its own.
SkyLinx 6y ago
Yeah, taxes is the main hassle I definitely want to avoid.

SkyLinx 6y ago

Thanks, sounds like your experience so far has been positive, right?

seanwilson 6y ago
Yep, let me know if you've got any questions. The only bad things I can think of is their API documentation wasn't that clear sometimes (their email support always helped though, and maybe the docs have improved now), their API was missing a few things I expected (like being able to query subscriptions by email address, but maybe that's changed), and they don't have a ton of features compared to say Fastspring (e.g. there's no self-service area where users can view and manage their subscription, but you can get the API to generate a link you can send to a user that lets them cancel their subscription and another link that lets them update their payment details).
- SkyLinx 6y ago
  Awesome. How do you manage testing considering that they don't have a test environment? Do you test with the same account as production or with a different account created just for testing? Also how quickly do they usually respond when you contact them? Thanks!
  - seanwilson 6y ago
    I just created a separate Paddle account with a different email address for testing. Inside that account, I manually created test versions of each product. In my testing branch, I use the testing product IDs for the checkout. You can also give yourself discount codes that give 100% off to test directly with the production Paddle account, or just refund yourself if you want to test some real payments. Would be nice if they had more testing features build in though. > Also how quickly do they usually respond when you contact them? Usually after one working day (not on weekends).
    - SkyLinx 6y ago
      Do they allow creating accounts just for testing? Would I risk that they close them? One thing that annoys me about the lack of a test environment is also that they allow only one webhook URL per account. I have three environments for my SaaS, dev/staging/prod. So with Chargebee I have the "live site" (as they call it) linked to the prod environment with its own webhook URL. Then I have the "test site" shared between dev and staging. But with Chargebee I can add multiple webhook URLs, so all events get sent to both dev and staging and each environment only cares about its own events. With Paddle, unless I create three accounts for the different environments, I would have to somehow share a webhook URL between at least dev and staging if I create one account for dev/staging and another for production. I guess I could create a simple app that proxies requests to the environments by looking at some string that tells which environment the event is for (I know that Paddle allows you to add a passthrough setting with some custom data - do you know if this persists across all future events for a subscription?)