These four tools all sit between you and your customer's money, but they are not the same kind of thing. Three of them become the legal seller of your product — the Merchant of Record — and take VAT and sales-tax registration, filing and remittance off your plate. One is a billing platform that leaves you as the seller. That single difference explains most of the fee gap, and most of the workload gap.
Per checkout transaction. No monthly fee. Products under $10 and invoicing use cases are quoted separately.
Per transaction, calculated on the tax-inclusive total. Surcharges apply — see the comparison table before you assume 5%.
No single published rate. Third-party reports put a common baseline around 5.9% + $0.95 — your quote is what counts.
Flow plan: 0.80% of monthly invoicing volume, or $99/mo + 0.65%. Your payment gateway's fees come on top.
A payment processor (Stripe in its standard setup, for example) moves money from your customer's card to you. You remain the legal seller, so registering for VAT in the EU, tracking economic-nexus thresholds across US states, filing returns and remitting the tax are your jobs. Tools like Stripe Tax can calculate the tax (for an extra per-transaction fee), but calculation is not filing, and filing is not liability transfer.
A Merchant of Record (MoR) — Paddle, Lemon Squeezy and FastSpring here — legally sells your product to the buyer in its own name. The MoR's name is on the receipt, the MoR registers, collects, files and remits the transaction taxes, and the MoR carries chargeback exposure as the seller. You supply the product and receive a net payout. That is what the roughly two-point fee gap over a bare processor buys: not a payment button, but a tax department you don't have to build.
Chargebee sits outside both boxes. It is neither a processor nor, by default, an MoR. It is a billing and revenue platform that orchestrates subscriptions on top of a gateway you connect yourself — and because you stay the seller, the tax obligations stay with you unless you add its separate MoR layer (offered via a partner, with no published pricing as of November 2026). Comparing Chargebee's headline percentage directly against an MoR's all-in rate is the most common mistake in this category.
This is a summary of how the models differ based on vendors' published descriptions. It is not tax advice; your obligations depend on what you sell, where your buyers are, and your own situation.
| Paddle | Lemon Squeezy | FastSpring | Chargebee | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Merchant of Record for SaaS & digital products | Merchant of Record for digital products & simple SaaS | Merchant of Record for software & SaaS, enterprise-leaning | Subscription billing & revenue platform (not a processor, not an MoR by default) |
| Who is the legal seller | Paddle | Lemon Squeezy | FastSpring | You — MoR only via a separate partner add-on, pricing not published |
| VAT / sales tax | Registered, collected, filed and remitted by Paddle | Registered, collected, filed and remitted by Lemon Squeezy | Registered, collected, filed and remitted by FastSpring | You register, file and remit. Chargebee calculates from your settings or a connected tax engine (e.g. Avalara) |
| Headline price | 5% + $0.50 per checkout transaction, no monthly fee | 5% + $0.50 per transaction, no monthly fee for ecommerce features | No published rate — quote-based. Third-party reports commonly cite ~5.9% + $0.95 as a baseline | Flow: $0 + 0.80% of monthly invoicing volume, or $99/mo + 0.65% (crossover ≈ $66K/mo). Gateway fees are extra |
| Surcharges & extras to know | Under-$10 products and invoicing are custom-quoted. Currency conversion margin of 2–3% when a sale converts into your balance currency, up to +1.5% more on payouts in another currency; $20 chargeback fee | +1.5% buyers outside the US, +1.5% PayPal, +0.5% subscriptions, +5% on cart-recovery sales, +3% on sales through your own affiliate program. Fee is calculated on the tax-inclusive total | FX markups on non-USD sales are reported but vary widely by source — confirm in your quote. Transaction fees are reportedly not returned on refunds | Payment processing is not included (e.g. a US domestic card via Stripe is 2.9% + $0.30 on top). CPQ, revenue recognition and retention tools are separate products |
| Payouts | Monthly, by the 15th for the previous month; $100 minimum (adjustable). Wire or Payoneer; a SWIFT fee can apply when currencies and bank country don't match | Twice monthly (created 1st & 15th, paid 14th & 28th) after a 13-day hold; $50 minimum. Free to US banks, 1% to banks elsewhere; PayPal fees apply | Reported as twice monthly or monthly depending on source and contract — confirm in your quote | No payouts — money settles through your own gateway account on that gateway's schedule |
| Getting started | Verification required: domain review, business identification, identity check. Manual reviews are quoted in business days, not minutes | Store activation review required (officially 1–2 business days; budget more). Test mode until approved | Sales process and a quote first; built for businesses with volume to discuss | Self-serve signup; connect your own gateway. No MoR review because there is no MoR |
| Selling from Japan | Japan is not on Paddle's unsupported list; payouts by wire or Payoneer (confirm your payout currency and any conversion margin) | Japan is listed for bank payouts in the official supported-countries documentation — one of the clearer Japan stories here | Sells into 200+ regions; seller-side arrangements are set during the sales process — confirm Japan payout details in your quote | Depends on your gateway: your gateway account's country support and payout rules govern, not Chargebee's |
| Trade-off to know | The flat rate is simple, but conversion margins can quietly add 2–3 points on cross-currency sales, and approval is a gate, not a formality | The headline 5% stacks: an international subscription sale is 7% + $0.50 before payout fees. Since the Stripe acquisition, updates have slowed and a migration path to Stripe Managed Payments is the stated direction | You cannot model your exact cost before talking to sales, and the reported baseline is the most expensive fixed fee here — painful on small tickets | The cheapest-looking headline in this table, because it excludes processing and all of tax compliance. You are buying billing depth, not a seller-of-record |
Prices checked November 2026 against the vendors' public pricing pages and documentation; FastSpring publishes no single rate, so its figures are third-party-reported ranges, labeled as such. Chargebee's plan structure has been revised recently (older Starter / Performance tiers still appear in some sources) — confirm the current structure on its pricing page. Plans and fees change; always confirm before you commit.
Headline rates hide the two things that move your real cost: the fixed per-transaction amount (which punishes small tickets) and the surcharges and payout fees that sit outside the headline. These examples are arithmetic on the published rates above — the full workings are reproducible from each vendor's pricing and fee documentation.
| Scenario (per sale) | Paddle | Lemon Squeezy | FastSpring* | Chargebee + Stripe** |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $10 one-time download, US buyer | $1.00 (10.0%) | $1.00 (10.0%) | $1.54 (15.4%) | $0.67 (6.7%) |
| $29/mo subscription, US buyer | $1.95 (6.7%) | $2.10 (7.2%) | $2.66 (9.2%) | $1.37 (4.7%) |
| $29/mo subscription, buyer outside the US | $1.95 (6.7%) plus any currency-conversion margin | $2.53 (8.7%) | $2.66 (9.2%) plus any FX markup in your quote | $1.37 (4.7%) plus your gateway's international-card fees |
| $99 annual plan, US buyer | $5.45 (5.5%) | $5.45 one-time / $5.95 as a subscription (5.5% / 6.0%) | $6.80 (6.9%) | $3.96 (4.0%) |
*FastSpring has no published rate; figures use the commonly reported baseline of 5.9% + $0.95 for illustration only — a negotiated quote can land well below this. **Chargebee Flow pay-as-you-go (0.80%) plus Stripe's US domestic card rate (2.9% + $0.30). This column excludes tax calculation tools, filing, and your own compliance time, because Chargebee doesn't sell them — that absence is the point of the comparison.
Two readings worth taking away. First, the fixed fee is a small-ticket tax: $0.50 is 1.7% of a $29 sale but 5% of a $10 one, which is why Paddle routes under-$10 products to custom pricing and why a $0.95 fixed fee makes the reported FastSpring baseline the wrong tool for cheap downloads. Second, tax-inclusive fee calculation compounds silently: Lemon Squeezy's own documentation example — a $20 product with 20% VAT, so a $24 total — produces a $2.06 fee for an international sale, leaving the seller $17.94. The fee is charged on money that was never the seller's revenue.
And the honest counterweight: at $29/mo and 100 subscribers, the Chargebee + Stripe column saves roughly $60–$90 a month against the MoRs on fees alone — until you price the alternative properly. Adding tax calculation (Stripe Tax at 0.5%) still leaves filing with you; filing services are priced per month, and at this scale a single monthly filing fee can erase the entire fee saving, before counting registrations and your own hours. The MoR premium is easiest to justify exactly when you are smallest and selling into the most countries — and hardest to justify once one or two home markets dominate your sales and your volume makes a negotiated or self-managed stack cheaper per dollar.
Paddle is a Merchant of Record built for software and SaaS: it becomes the legal seller, and its single published price — 5% + $0.50 per checkout transaction, no monthly fee — covers payments, subscription billing, global tax registration, filing and remittance, fraud screening, chargeback handling and buyer support. Two boundaries sit inside that simplicity: products priced under $10 and businesses that need invoicing are moved to custom pricing, so the published rate does not describe low-ticket or B2B-invoiced selling. Before Paddle acts as your MoR you pass verification in three parts — a review of the domain(s) you will sell from, business identification, and identity verification for owners or sole traders.
Lemon Squeezy packages the MoR model for independent developers and creators: a hosted storefront, checkout links, license keys, file delivery, subscriptions, and built-in tools to run affiliate programs and email for your own products — all on the same headline of 5% + $0.50 per transaction with no monthly fee for ecommerce features. Read the fee documentation before the pricing page: the fee is calculated on the tax-inclusive order total, and surcharges stack (international buyers, PayPal, subscriptions, cart recovery, affiliate-referred sales), so real-world rates commonly land between about 5.5% and 8% depending on your customer mix. Every store passes an activation review before live selling. Stripe acquired Lemon Squeezy in July 2024; in January 2026 its CEO said the team had been focused on building Stripe Managed Payments, support and updates had slowed as a result, and the goal is an easy migration path for Lemon Squeezy users — context worth having before you build on it for the long term.
FastSpring has operated as a Merchant of Record for software companies since 2005, reselling your product as the legal seller across 200+ regions with localized checkout in many currencies and languages, subscription billing, invoicing and global tax collection and remittance included. What it does not publish is a price: pricing is quote-based, set through a sales process by volume and product type. Independent sources consistently report a baseline in the region of 5.9% + $0.95 per transaction, with lower negotiated rates at volume — treat that as a negotiating landmark, not a rate card, and expect foreign-exchange markups and refund terms to be defined in your quote. The shape of the offer tells you the audience: established software and B2B sellers with the volume to negotiate, not a solo developer who wants to sell a $15 template this afternoon.
Chargebee is a subscription billing and revenue-management platform that sits on top of a payment gateway you choose (40+ are supported, including Stripe, Adyen and Braintree). Its current self-serve structure, Flow, is $0 + 0.80% of monthly invoicing volume, or $99/month + 0.65% once volume passes roughly $66K a month — and note that Chargebee has revised its packaging recently, so older Starter and Performance tiers still circulate in other articles. What that buys is the deepest billing machinery in this comparison: complex plan catalogs, usage-based pricing, proration, trials, smart dunning, and separately priced CPQ and revenue-recognition products. What it does not buy is a seller: Chargebee processes no payments itself, you remain the merchant of record, tax calculation runs on your configuration or a connected tax engine such as Avalara, and registration, filing and remittance stay on your side of the table. Its MoR option exists only as a partner-provided add-on layer with no published pricing.
If buyers are spread across countries and you have no appetite for VAT registrations and foreign filings, you are shopping for an MoR (Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, FastSpring) — full stop. If your sales are concentrated in one or two markets where you already file taxes, a processor-plus-billing stack around Chargebee can be rational.
Take your average order value and compute each option's per-sale cost from the table above, including surcharges for your actual buyer geography and payout fees to your actual bank country. Under about $15 per sale, fixed fees dominate every headline percentage.
Paddle verifies your domain, business and identity; Lemon Squeezy reviews every store; FastSpring starts with a sales conversation. None of these is instant, and a rejected or stalled review is a launch delay. Prepare a live site with pricing, terms, refund and privacy pages before you apply anywhere.
For MoRs, add conversion margins and payout fees to the transaction rate. For Chargebee, add gateway processing, tax calculation, filing costs and your own hours. The honest comparison is monthly total cost at your volume — the worked examples above are a template, not a verdict.
In its standard setup, Stripe processes payments while you remain the legal seller — so VAT and sales-tax registration, filing and remittance are yours, and Stripe Tax only calculates amounts for an extra fee. A Merchant of Record becomes the legal seller itself: it registers, collects, files and remits those taxes under its own registrations, issues the customer's receipt, and carries chargeback exposure as the seller. Stripe now also sells an MoR option (Managed Payments, priced as an add-on to processing fees), which underlines that the distinction is about who the seller is, not which brand you pick. This summary is general information, not tax advice.
It depends on geography and scale, and the math section above shows both directions. A bare processor stack is cheaper per transaction (around 3.9% on a US card before billing and tax add-ons, versus roughly 6–7% effective at an MoR on a $29 sale). What the processor stack doesn't include at any of those prices is registration and filing in your buyers' countries. Sellers with customers in many countries and no finance staff usually find the premium is buying real work; sellers concentrated in one home market often don't need it.
Based on published documentation checked in November 2026: Lemon Squeezy lists Japan for bank payouts in its official supported-countries documentation. Paddle does not list Japan among its unsupported countries and pays out by wire or Payoneer, with currency-conversion margins to factor in. FastSpring's seller arrangements are set during its sales process, so Japan payout specifics belong in your quote. For Chargebee, the question belongs to your payment gateway, since Chargebee itself moves no money. In all cases, how selling through a foreign MoR interacts with your Japanese tax position is a question for a tax professional — this page summarizes vendor information and is not tax advice.
Because it shows up on the same shortlists — searches like "Stripe alternative tax" and "merchant of record pricing" surface billing platforms alongside MoRs — and the difference is exactly what buyers get wrong. Chargebee sells subscription-billing depth on top of your own gateway. If your problem is billing complexity, it's a strong candidate. If your problem is tax liability, Chargebee alone doesn't solve it, and its MoR route is a partner add-on without published pricing.
Stripe acquired Lemon Squeezy in July 2024, and the platform still operates and accepts sellers as of November 2026 at the same 5% + $0.50 headline. In January 2026 its CEO wrote that the team had been building Stripe Managed Payments, that support and updates had slowed, and that the goal was to give Lemon Squeezy users an easy way to move to Managed Payments when ready. Nothing published announces a shutdown — but if you're choosing a platform to build on for years, that stated direction belongs in your decision.
Because this guide is compiled from the vendors' published pricing pages, fee documentation and help centers, not from selling through the platforms. Where a judgment appears — for example, that fixed fees punish small tickets — it is arithmetic on published rates, shown in the worked examples so you can re-run it with your own numbers.