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I use Paddle for taking payments for a paid Chrome extension (https://www.checkbot.io/ https://www.checkbot.io/) and they've been great with me. The big draw wa

I use Paddle for taking payments for a paid Chrome extension (https://www.checkbot.io/ https://www.checkbot.io/) and they've been great with me. The big draw was the "tax management" feature where they take care of EU VAT and other complicated country specific tax regulations, unlike say Stripe and Chargebee. It makes tax returns really straightforward where all you have to process is the 12 monthly payments Paddle send you each year e.g. over the worst case of having to register for VAT in multiple countries and risk making tax mistakes. Their 5% + 0.50 cent fees are high (lower than FastSring though) but there's value in simplifying your admin especially if you're a solo founder. Related to the comments about Paddle giving you the email addresses of your users: I went with Paddle over integrated Google payments at the time because Google gave you no access to your paid users or their payment methods and I was worried about Google payments shutting down - this turned out to be a great choice when Google deprecated their Chrome payment features with minimal migration options ("There is no way to bulk export your existing user licenses, so you need to have your users help with this part of the migration"). Not predicting Apple would do this but you need to keep your options open where you can so you can keep your customers if the worst happens. 30% fees is crazy in comparison too.

pimterry 5y ago
I'm a Paddle vendor too, and they have been good! As a solo EU founder, having to do near zero accountancy is a huge deal that Stripe can't (currently) offer. That said, I wish they'd improve their API. It's very limited, poorly designed in some places and extraordinarily slow in others. The checkout & tools are good enough that you can ignore it for a long time, but eventually you want to integrate with it and it's a massive pain. Definitely the worst part of the product, and simultaneously the best thing about Stripe, which does occasionally tempt me to jump ship...
- seanwilson 5y ago
  > It's very limited, poorly designed in some places and extraordinarily slow in others. Which parts? I do remember the docs being quite sparse when I was doing the initial integration. Most of my support questions about "how do you do X with the API?" were answered quickly but the answer was often "you can't" for a few surprising things (like grabbing a subscription via email lookup but maybe this has changed). Saying that, once I had it set up I haven't had to touch it and haven't had any issues, but my needs aren't that complex. A basic portal to let users check and edit their subscriptions would be nice though instead of everyone having to build this themselves.

pimterry 5y ago

I'm a Paddle vendor too, and they have been good! As a solo EU founder, having to do near zero accountancy is a huge deal that Stripe can't (currently) offer. That said, I wish they'd improve their API. It's very limited, poorly designed in some places and extraordinarily slow in others. The checkout & tools are good enough that you can ignore it for a long time, but eventually you want to integrate with it and it's a massive pain. Definitely the worst part of the product, and simultaneously the best thing about Stripe, which does occasionally tempt me to jump ship...

seanwilson 5y ago
> It's very limited, poorly designed in some places and extraordinarily slow in others. Which parts? I do remember the docs being quite sparse when I was doing the initial integration. Most of my support questions about "how do you do X with the API?" were answered quickly but the answer was often "you can't" for a few surprising things (like grabbing a subscription via email lookup but maybe this has changed). Saying that, once I had it set up I haven't had to touch it and haven't had any issues, but my needs aren't that complex. A basic portal to let users check and edit their subscriptions would be nice though instead of everyone having to build this themselves.