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 runs your billing as a managed service and takes a share of your revenue for it. We charge a flat fee, and the accounts stay yours. The real question is how much of their machine you actually use.
The machine Paddle runs
Global tax compliance is the headline, but the real engine is subscription operations. Paddle retries failed renewals, sends payment reminder emails, handles invoices, and writes quotes for business deals. Serious SaaS companies hand Paddle their whole billing department and get a working one back. That is not a small thing to replace.
Why operators step off
Paddle's share of your revenue grows as you grow. Your customers live in Paddle's records rather than yours, and crypto is not allowed. When founders want the buyer, the money, and the rules back under their own name, they do the math on that convenience and often find it expensive.
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, in your own payment account.
- 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.
- Managed payment recovery. Your provider retries failed charges, but there is no recovery team.
- Invoicing and quote tools for business sales.
How to make the move
- Open your own card processing account. Stripe is the usual choice.
- 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.
A fair case for staying
If payment recovery or global tax compliance keeps your business running, Paddle is doing a job we chose not to do. Stay with them until that trade changes for you.
Try it before you decide
The free plan is a full sandbox. You get every feature and 150 transactions a month, and we never ask for a card.