Stripe alternatives: six options for SaaS billing, priced at three volumes

Why teams leave Stripe

Stripe's headline fee is simple: 2.9% + 30¢ per successful domestic card transaction, no monthly fee and no free plan. The bill grows in layers. International cards add 1.5%, a required currency conversion adds 1%, Stripe Billing is "0.7% of Billing volume" on pay-as-you-go or from $620 a month on a one-year contract, and Stripe Tax is a separate product (Complete from $90 a month on a one-year contract, or 0.5% per transaction on the no-code Basic option, in places where you are registered to collect tax).

A team selling subscriptions worldwide therefore tends to land on four line items: payments, Billing, Tax and the work of filing returns itself. Managed Payments is Stripe's answer: "3.5% per successful Managed Payments transaction in addition to Payments fees", covering indirect tax compliance and remittance in more than 75 countries, fraud prevention, dispute management, invoicing and customer support. Teams who would rather have one fee and one contract for all of that look at Paddle, Lemon Squeezy and Polar, which were built as merchants of record from the start.

A second group leaves for the opposite reason: they want less than Stripe's all-in-one platform. A European business that mostly takes iDEAL and EEA consumer cards may prefer Mollie's schedule, and a large enterprise may want Interchange++ pricing from Adyen. A third group wants a billing layer that is independent of any one processor, which is what Chargebee sells.

What Stripe costs at $2,000, $10,000 and $50,000 a month

Assume every sale is a $100 domestic card payment with no tax, so $2,000 is 20 payments, $10,000 is 100 and $50,000 is 500. Stripe Payments: 2.9% of $2,000 is $58 plus 20 x $0.30 = $6, so $64; at $10,000 it is $290 + $30 = $320; at $50,000 it is $1,450 + $150 = $1,600. Stripe Billing at 0.7% adds $14, $70 and $350 on top. Managed Payments at 3.5% adds $70, $350 and $1,750, which lifts the three totals to $134, $670 and $3,350 before any Billing fee.

The $620-a-month Billing contract equals the pay-as-you-go fee at $88,571 of monthly Billing volume (620 / 0.007). Stripe's page does not state what volume the flat price covers, so treat that number as a comparison point rather than a break-even you can rely on. Every figure here excludes disputes, international surcharges and Tax.

What to keep Stripe for

Stripe's page lists Billing with "Smart Retries and recovery workflow automations" and the customer portal and Checkout next to it, so a team already running subscriptions there has retries, hosted pages and invoices in the same dashboard as payments. Moving to a merchant of record means giving up that processor-level control: you sell through Paddle's or Lemon Squeezy's checkout and see their payout, not Stripe's. If you invoice enterprise customers under your own contracts or want to stay the seller your customers buy from, that trade is not worth making.

Staying is also right when your volume is high enough that a flat percentage on top of payments is cheap relative to what you would pay a merchant of record. At $50,000 a month, Paddle's 5% + 50¢ costs $2,750 against Stripe Payments plus Billing at $1,950, an $800 monthly gap that buys you tax filing and chargeback handling. Whether that is worth it depends on how many tax jurisdictions you would otherwise register in.

Fees side by side, 7 Oct 2026

Read on 7 Oct 2026 from Stripe, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Polar, Chargebee, Adyen and Mollie. Units differ, so rows are not all like-for-like: some are per sale, Chargebee is per invoiced volume, and Mollie is listed in euros.

Six Stripe alternatives and who each is for

1. Paddle: one fee that includes tax and chargebacks

Paddle's pricing page lists "5% + 50¢ per transaction" with no monthly fee, and positions itself as your "Merchant of Record" with "Global tax and regulatory compliance" and "Fraud protection, chargebacks, and buyer support" included. It also says "No monthly fees, migration fees, or hidden extras" and offers to help you "migrate without putting subscribers at risk".

Two payout details from Paddle's help page matter for cash flow: the minimum payout starts at $100 and is adjustable up to $100,000, and for some countries a $15 SWIFT fee may apply. On $10,000 of $100 sales, Paddle's fee is $500 + 100 x $0.50 = $550, against $320 for Stripe Payments alone.

Trade-off: The fee is higher than Stripe Payments on every sale, and your customers buy from Paddle rather than from you.

2. Lemon Squeezy: simple merchant-of-record sales, with an ownership caveat

Lemon Squeezy charges a platform fee of "$0.50 + 5% of order total", plus 1.5% for international orders, 1.5% for PayPal and 0.5% for subscription payments, with no monthly charge. The fee is calculated on the total order value, so tax-inclusive totals raise it. At $10,000 of domestic $100 subscription sales that is $500 + $50 + $50 = $600. Payouts are created on the 1st and 15th of the month after a 13-day hold, with a $50 minimum.

Product differences from its docs: renewal reminders go out seven days before renewal, failed payments are retried four times over two weeks, and a usage-reporting API supports usage-based plans. Its own 2026 update post describes Stripe Managed Payments and a migration path to it, and the page footer reads "Sold through Link, LLC f/k/a Lemon Squeezy LLC".

Trade-off: Its own 2026 post warns of "slower support responses and less frequent product updates", and its posts describe the Stripe acquisition, so leaving Stripe for it does not take you outside Stripe's ownership.

3. Polar: developer-focused merchant of record with fee tiers

Polar publishes every rate: Starter is free at 5% + 50¢, Pro is $20 a month at 3.8% + 40¢, Growth is $100 a month at 3.6% + 35¢ and Scale is $400 a month at 3.4% + 30¢. Its page lists break-even sales against Starter of $1,379 a month for Pro, $5,634 for Growth and $19,048 for Scale. At $10,000 of $100 sales, Pro costs $380 + $40 + $20 = $440; at $50,000, Scale costs $1,700 + $150 + $400 = $2,250.

Extras to price in: +1.5% on international (non-US) cards, Stripe's payout fees passed through without markup ($2 per month of active payouts and 0.25% + $0.25 per payout), and $15 per dispute regardless of outcome. Organizations created before 27 May 2026 can stay on an Early Member rate of 4% + 40¢ plus 0.5% on subscriptions, but that is retired if they upgrade.

Trade-off: Payout and dispute fees come on top of the listed rate, and Polar says it may suspend accounts that cannot keep chargebacks under the card networks' thresholds.

4. Chargebee: subscription rules on top of any gateway

Chargebee's Flow plan is "$0 + 0.80%" or "$99 + 0.65%" of monthly invoicing volume, with a $66K breakeven between the two, 100M usage events a month included and "40+ payment gateways" including Stripe, Adyen and Mollie. At $50,000 invoiced it costs $400 on the $0 option or $99 + $325 = $424; at $100,000 it costs $800 or $99 + $650 = $749. Stripe Billing's 0.7% is $350 and $700 at the same volumes.

Chargebee is the choice if you want to switch gateways later without rebuilding subscription logic. It lists smart dunning, usage-based billing and sales tax on Flow; account hierarchy, SAML and approvals on price points are not on Flow, and Enterprise is "Schedule a demo". It does not take payments itself, so a gateway fee still applies.

Trade-off: You pay Chargebee and a processor, and at these volumes its percentage is higher than Stripe Billing's.

5. Adyen: enterprise card processing with Interchange++

Adyen's page says "For each transaction, we charge a fixed processing fee + a fee determined by the payment method": a $0.13 processing fee, then for example Mastercard at "Interchange+ + 0.60%", American Express at 3.95% and iDEAL at EUR 0.22, "with no setup or monthly fees". Because interchange varies, the page does not let you compute a flat percentage for a card mix.

A product difference from the page is settlement: "Choose when and in which currency you want to settle." Adyen's page lists processing and payment-method fees, not subscription billing, so SaaS teams usually pair it with a billing layer; Chargebee's page names Adyen among its gateways.

Trade-off: Interchange++ makes budgeting harder than a flat rate, because the card portion of the fee changes with the card used.

6. Mollie: European payment methods and euro pricing

Mollie lists "No minimum costs, no lock-in contracts, no hidden fees" and charges per successful transaction: EEA consumer cards 1.80% + EUR 0.25, EEA commercial cards 2.90% + EUR 0.25, non-EEA cards 3.25% + EUR 0.25. A EUR 100 EEA consumer-card payment therefore costs EUR 1.80 + EUR 0.25 = EUR 2.05.

Its payout schedule has a fee: EUR 0.25 per additional payout after five a month, charged when you process less than EUR 500,000 a year. The page also asks "Process more than €100,000 a month?" as the entry point to volume pricing, and Mollie offers platform payments to embed accounts and payments in your product.

Trade-off: Pricing is in euros and built around European methods, and Mollie is a processor, so tax and subscription logic stay with you.

Leaving Stripe: what moves, what does not, and the cutover order

The steps follow Stripe's own docs on payment data exports, webhooks and subscription webhooks, and Lemon Squeezy's migration guide, read on 7 Oct 2026.

1. Ask Stripe for a card-data export before you touch anything else. Stripe says it can "securely transfer your credit card data" to a PCI DSS Level 1 processor and needs the receiving processor's Attestation of Compliance (or Visa registry listing) and a PGP public key of 4096 bits or more hosted over HTTPS. A merchant of record that takes over your customers handles this on its side.
2. Know what the export contains. It is an encrypted JSON file with customer IDs, email addresses, metadata and card details. Stripe says it "doesn't export your account's payment history, subscriptions, or other objects", so pull those through the API or Dashboard yourself. Credentials saved with Link are excluded, and Lemon Squeezy's guide adds that SEPA, Bacs and ACH records stored as payment method objects cannot be copied between Stripe accounts.
3. List the webhook events your app depends on and re-point them. For subscriptions Stripe documents invoice.paid (provision access once the subscription is active), invoice.payment_failed, customer.subscription.updated, customer.subscription.deleted and customer.subscription.trial_will_end, which is sent 3 days before a trial ends. Map each to the new vendor's event, because naming and timing will differ.
4. Plan secrets. Every Stripe endpoint has its own whsec_ signing secret and the Stripe-Signature header must be verified against the raw request body. Keep the Stripe endpoint running until the last old subscription renews or ends. You can roll a secret with the old one valid for up to 24 hours, and Stripe retries undelivered live events for up to three days.
5. Run in parallel by cohort. Send new customers to the new system and leave existing subscriptions on Stripe until they renew, or import them and cancel each Stripe subscription afterwards, because Lemon Squeezy's guide warns to ensure all subscriptions are cancelled in Stripe "to avoid double billing".
6. Keep the Stripe account open after cutover. Stripe says you can continue to access your data through the Dashboard and API after you stop processing payments, as long as you do not close or delete the account, which is your rollback path and your source for refunds and old invoices.

Which one to pick

• Stay on Stripe if you already file tax in the places you sell, run enterprise invoicing or need payment methods only a processor offers; at $50,000 a month Payments plus Billing is $1,950 against $2,750 for Paddle.
• Switch to Paddle or Polar if you sell globally to consumers or small teams and want tax, fraud and disputes in one fee: Paddle is 5% + 50¢, Polar's Pro plan is $440 on $10,000 of $100 sales.
• Pick Lemon Squeezy if you want a merchant-of-record checkout with license keys and usage reporting and accept the 2026 support caveats in its own post.
• Pick Chargebee if the gap is subscription logic (plans, dunning, invoicing) and you want to keep Stripe, Adyen or Mollie as the processor behind it.
• Pick Adyen if you are an enterprise optimising card cost with Interchange++, or Mollie if your customers are mostly in the EEA and pay in euros.

Related reading: All alternatives pages, Stripe vs Paddle, Chargebee vs Recurly, Billing and subscription tools, Choosing a billing platform, Reducing churn with tools.