Stripe vs Paddle: which billing platform fits your SaaS

What each one charges

Fees below were read from each vendor's pricing page on 7 October 2026. Neither charges a monthly platform fee on its headline rate.

The fee math at four ticket sizes

Both vendors use a percentage plus a flat amount, and the flat amounts differ, so small payments behave differently from large ones. The table applies each published formula to a single domestic card payment. The middle column is Stripe's standard rate plus its 3.5% merchant-of-record fee, which is the like-for-like comparison with Paddle.

The crossover sits at about $14.29: 1.4% of the payment equals the 20¢ difference in flat fees. Below it, Stripe's merchant-of-record option is cheaper than Paddle; above it, Paddle is. If you also run subscriptions through Stripe Billing, add its 0.7% to the Stripe columns.

Scale that to 500 subscribers on a $29 monthly plan, which is $14,500 of monthly billings. Payment fees alone come to:

The premium over the standard rate is therefore about $404 a month, or $4,854 a year, and that is the yearly price of having someone else be your seller. If registering, collecting and filing tax in every place your customers live would cost you more than that in accountant time and software, the higher rate is cheaper in total. If nearly all your revenue comes from one country where you already file returns, the standard rate keeps that money. At this ticket size the two merchant-of-record options sit about $1,236 a year apart, in the cheaper one's favour.

Who is the seller: the tax and liability difference

With Stripe's standard rate you are the merchant. You set up products, appear on the invoice as the seller, and register for VAT, GST or US sales tax wherever your customers' locations create an obligation. Chargebacks land with you. With Paddle the sale is between Paddle and your customer. Its pricing page says "Start selling globally with Paddle as your Merchant of Record" and lists tax compliance, fraud protection, chargebacks and buyer support among what the rate covers. Stripe's Managed Payments is the same idea on Stripe: its page says it includes indirect tax compliance and remittance in more than 75 countries, fraud prevention, dispute management, invoicing and customer support.

The cost of any merchant-of-record model beyond the fee is control. You hand checkout, tax rules and billing records to the vendor, and your customer's invoice names the vendor as the seller. For low-ticket B2C and small-business software that is usually a good trade. For enterprise contracts that need your own invoice, purchase-order workflows or negotiated terms, owning the relationship through Stripe's standard rate is the easier path.

Billing events that drive your email

Both products stream events you can turn into customer messages.

• Stripe. The subscription webhooks include invoice.paid, invoice.payment_failed and customer.subscription.deleted. Stripe's documentation says to provision access on invoice.paid, and on invoice.payment_failed to notify the customer, enable Smart Retries or collect a new payment method. Failed webhook deliveries are retried in live mode for up to three days with exponential backoff (Stripe webhook docs). Stripe can also send failed-payment, renewal-reminder and expiring-card emails itself, each with a link where the customer updates a payment method (customer emails docs).
• Paddle. Its webhook list includes transaction.payment_failed, transaction.past_due, subscription.past_due, subscription.canceled and subscription.imported, and it documents signature verification (Paddle webhook docs). The event names differ from Stripe's, so handlers are not portable.

Retrying a failed card happens inside the billing system in both cases. What you add is the message that gets the customer to fix it, and you need to decide whether the vendor's built-in emails or your lifecycle tool owns that, so one failure never produces two messages.

Moving between them

Whichever direction you go, treat it as five steps.

1. Export products, prices, coupons, active subscriptions and invoice history, and map each plan to its counterpart on the new platform.
2. Open new signups on the new platform first. This avoids card migration entirely for that cohort and shows you real payment, tax and refund behaviour.
3. Ask both vendors how saved cards move. Paddle's pricing page lists a migration service ("migrate without putting subscribers at risk in the process") and its webhooks include subscription.imported. Without a card transfer, every existing subscriber has to re-enter a card, so expect some churn at that step.
4. Rewrite and replay webhook handlers. Map invoice.paid and invoice.payment_failed to their Paddle counterparts by hand, since the states are not one-to-one, and test duplicate and out-of-order delivery.
5. Move existing subscribers in cohorts, smallest plans first, and keep the old system live until a full billing cycle has reconciled.

Which to choose

• Stripe at the standard rate fits usage-based billing, custom invoicing, marketplaces and enterprise deals, provided someone owns tax registration and filing.
• Paddle fits a small team selling software internationally to individuals and small businesses, where a flat 5% + 50¢ that includes tax, fraud and buyer support beats building that function.
• Stripe with Managed Payments fits teams already on Stripe whose payments are small. The flat 30¢ beats a flat 50¢ up to the crossover of about $14.29.
• Revisit when revenue grows. Both vendors offer custom pricing at high volume, and a flat 50¢ stops mattering once average payments are in the hundreds.

Related reading: choosing a billing platform, Chargebee vs Recurly, Stripe alternatives and the billing and subscription category.