Renewals and the card on file
Stripe and the other card providers run recurring charges on their side. The same subscribe button starts them.
Pact · III
Coming from Paddle?
Paddle takes 5% of your revenue plus 50 cents a transaction to run your billing as a managed service. We charge a flat monthly price and leave the payment providers in your name. The question worth answering is how much of their machine you actually use.
The machine Paddle runs
Global tax compliance is the headline, and underneath it Paddle runs subscription operations: retrying failed renewals, sending payment reminders, issuing invoices, and writing quotes for business deals. If you lean on all of that, you are getting a billing department for the money. The trouble is that most of what you are billed for is machinery you never touch.
Why operators step off
Five percent is charged on revenue, not profit, so the bill grows every quarter you succeed and it is taken off the top. Your customers live in Paddle's records rather than yours, which means the relationship you built is on loan. Crypto is not allowed. Founders tend to leave the moment they price that convenience against a flat fee.
What stays the same
You still get subscriptions without writing billing code. A buyer clicks subscribe, renewals run on their own, and you can see who is active. Neither tool asks you to build that machinery yourself.
Still never yours to build
Leaving the managed service does not mean writing billing code yourself. The payment provider you connect does that work.
The cancellation page
Buyers manage and cancel their plans in the provider's hosted portal, such as the Stripe Customer Portal. You link to it, and you never have to build it.
The ledger of who is active
Subscription events land in your dashboard feed, so your product can check one status to decide who gets access.
Weigh it honestly
What you gain
- Your customer relationships back, inside a payment provider in your own name.
- A flat monthly price instead of a share of your revenue.
- Crypto and pay-by-mail options that Paddle does not allow.
- Renewals and a customer portal run by your provider, still with no billing code.
What you give up
- Tax registration, collection, and payment done for you.
- Their billing operations desk: managed recovery, invoicing, and quotes for business deals. Your provider still retries failed charges on its own.
How to make the move
- Open an account with a card payment provider. Stripe is the usual choice, and the account is in your name.
- Create a project, connect the account, add your plans as monthly or annual products.
- Put the subscribe button on your pricing page and walk the flow in test mode.
- Send new signups through the button. Existing Paddle subscriptions keep billing on Paddle until they end.
- Invite existing subscribers across by email, and retire the old plans as they wind down.
Subscription moves are gradual by nature. Running both systems while the old one winds down is normal, not a sign that something went wrong.
When staying makes sense
If managed recovery and global tax filing are load-bearing for your business, Paddle is doing work we chose not to do, and you should stay until that changes. Just know what the service actually costs. Five percent of revenue is the most expensive line most software companies never think to renegotiate.
Try it before you decide
The free plan is a full sandbox. You get every feature and 50 transactions a month, and we never ask for a card.