Payment picker: find how to get paid for your app

This post is an app. Answer the questions at the top and you get the payment providers that fit what you sell, with the fee and the main catch for each.

Under the picker you can put your own numbers into a fee calculator, check which providers work from your country, browse every provider, and see who handles what with each kind of provider.

It started as a separate site, paymentprocessor.dev. I moved it here, so the tools and the explanation live on the same page.

The first question: who is the seller?

Most payment comparisons start with a table of fees. I think the first question is a different one: will another company be the legal seller, or will you stay the merchant?

That choice changes much more than the fee. It decides who handles sales tax and VAT, disputes, fraud, invoices, billing support and payouts.

With a direct provider like Stripe, PayPal or Mollie, you are the seller. The fee is lower because the provider does a smaller job. Tax registration, filing, disputes and billing support stay with you.

With a Merchant of Record like Paddle, Polar, Lemon Squeezy or Creem, the provider becomes the seller to your buyer. It takes on the tax work and more of the support, and you pay a higher fee for it. You also accept its product rules, its payout timing and more dependence on one company.

Neither model is always better. The “Who handles what” table in the app shows the split line by line. I wrote the full argument in Merchant of Record or payment processor?.

How the fees are calculated

The calculator starts at 200 orders of $50, a $10,000 month, so you can check it against what $10,000 a month in sales costs on each payment provider, where I go through every provider’s catch. Change the numbers to see your own month.

Each provider’s rule comes from its own pricing page or docs, and the table shows when I checked it. When a provider only gives custom quotes, the app says so instead of inventing a number.

The calculator covers the transaction fees. Payout and currency conversion fees, refunds, chargebacks and the cost of filing taxes yourself are not in the total, and they can matter a lot. A cheaper fee with a direct provider can turn into a bigger bill once you pay an accountant to file VAT in other countries.

Creem sponsors this site. Its numbers come from its own pricing and docs like everyone else’s, and the picker ranks it with the same rules as the others.

Can you use it from your country?

Two country questions get mixed up all the time. One is whether the provider will onboard a business from your country. The other is whether your buyers can pay from theirs.

The country check in the app keeps them apart. Pick your country to see which providers accept you as a seller, then switch to buyers to see where customers can pay.

Before you switch

Choosing a provider is half the problem. Leaving one can be harder, because subscriptions, saved cards and invoices don’t always move with you.

If you already sell through one provider and the fees above make you want to switch, read the playbooks on migratingto.dev first. They cover moves between Paddle, Polar, FastSpring, Gumroad, Stripe Billing and Stripe Managed Payments.

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