Paddle

Paddle handles subscriptions, payments and tax compliance for software and games companies, operating as a merchant of record so that it, rather than the seller, is the legal party to each transaction.

The merchant of record model is the whole proposition and it is a genuinely different arrangement from a payment processor. When Paddle is the merchant, it takes on the obligation to register for, collect, file and remit sales tax and VAT in every jurisdiction where a customer buys. For a software company selling globally, that obligation is otherwise unbounded: digital goods rules differ by country and often by state, thresholds trigger registration requirements the seller may not notice crossing, and non-compliance accrues quietly until it surfaces as a liability.

The trade-off is priced accordingly and Paddle is upfront about it. Subscription billing and payments add up to 3.9 percent, international card payments add up to 4.4 percent, and full tax registration, filing and remittance adds 0.5 percent. That is meaningfully more than a bare payment processor charges, and the honest comparison is not against processing fees alone but against processing plus the cost of a tax compliance function.

Advanced churn recovery is an add-on at 0.02 to 0.07 dollars, and Paddle notes that sellers with products under 10 dollars or requiring invoicing should ask for custom pricing, since the fixed component of each transaction dominates at low ticket prices. Paddle serves software and games companies from startup to enterprise, with migration services, implementation support and a RevenueCat integration.