Paddle

Paddle offers a platform for software companies that combines payment processing, subscription and billing management, and compliance solutions in a unified service.

Paddle is a merchant of record for software: it sells your product to the customer in its own name and handles the machinery behind the sale, global VAT and sales tax, invoices, fraud screening, payment recovery, currency, and compliance, in exchange for a percentage of revenue.

Why founders use it: selling software worldwide as a one-person company means being a global tax collector unless someone else is the seller of record. Paddle absorbs that role completely, which is why indie SaaS and digital product businesses cluster around it. The margin math is simple, a few points more than raw processing versus the accountant, the tax registrations and the fraud losses it replaces.

A realistic setup: products and prices defined in Paddle, checkout overlay or embedded, webhooks syncing subscription state, and the tax question answered for every jurisdiction you never planned to serve. Their reporting also produces revenue by country out of the box.

Trade-offs: you lose the direct customer payment relationship, payouts arrive on a schedule, and the checkout experience carries their brand more than yours. Compare with Lemon Squeezy for a similar model aimed at digital creators and with Stripe plus tax tooling when staying the merchant of record matters.