A Paddle Alternative, With the Honest Arithmetic Rather Than the Flattering One

The other three are billing platforms. You keep your own payment processor and your own tax obligation and pay them for the software on top. Recurly is two hundred and forty nine a month plus zero point nine percent above forty thousand billed. Chargebee is zero point eight percent with no platform fee. Zuora publishes nothing at all. Paddle is a different category, because five percent plus fifty cents replaces your processor and your tax function as well as your billing. Lining the percentages up side by side compares three different things.

Not once you unpack it. A payment processor on its own is commonly two point nine percent and thirty cents. Add subscription billing, chargeback protection, revenue recovery and tax compliance, and Paddle’s own comparison puts the assembled equivalent at seven percent and above. Five percent is a fair price for that bundle. It is only expensive if you were never going to buy most of the bundle in the first place.

It means Paddle is the legal seller of your software rather than you. Your customer contracts with them, the receipt carries their name, and the sales tax obligation in each country belongs to them. They register, track the filing deadlines, prepare the records and submit the returns. Neither we nor any billing platform on this hub can lift that obligation off you, because none of us is the seller.

Whether your tiers still match what you sell. Whether the middle one has quietly stopped selling. Whether your trial ends before a new customer has seen anything work. Whether a fifth of your base sits on a discount nobody logged. Paddle will bill any pricing you configure, correctly, indefinitely. Deciding what that pricing ought to be is not part of any rate anybody charges.

Often you should not, and this page has already said so twice. Where it does make sense is when nobody owns your pricing, when the plan structure has drifted away from what you actually sell, or when you want the packaging, the trial and the churn reviewed every month by somebody outside the building. None of that requires leaving Paddle, and we would usually tell you not to.

On the headline numbers yes, and the headline numbers are misleading. At fifty thousand a month across five hundred transactions Paddle is two thousand seven hundred and fifty, covering payments, tax and your customers’ support. Our five hundred plus a processor at two point nine percent and thirty cents is roughly two thousand one hundred, before the Zoho license and before anybody deals with tax. The real gap is a few hundred dollars, and it vanishes the first time you cross a registration threshold abroad. Any comparison showing you five hundred against two thousand seven hundred and fifty is not being straight with you.

When you sell mostly in one country and your tax position is genuinely simple. When your customers need to contract with you directly for procurement or security review reasons. When you want payments settling into your own merchant account rather than arriving as a payout on somebody else’s schedule. Those three are real, and they are the cases where five percent buys you something you did not need.

They are not really the same product, so the question does not answer cleanly. Paddle is payments, tax and billing sold as one legal arrangement. Zoho Billing is a billing engine that sits inside the estate holding your customers and your accounts, and you bring your own processor. If tax compliance is your problem, Paddle wins and it is not close. If your problem is that your pricing has drifted and your billing data lives apart from your books, Zoho Billing is the better shape.

That is a large part of the reason to choose it. Billing writes into CRM, Books and Analytics with nothing in between, so the subscription, the customer record and the revenue reach the same place at the same time. There is no payout to reconcile and no export to schedule at month end.

We read your pricing and tell you what we think of it, then build the plans and the price book, set proration and upgrade rules, configure tax, connect and test the gateways, design and tune the dunning, work the failed payment report every cycle, build the revenue reporting, and wire it into CRM, Books and Analytics. We do not process payments and we do not take on your tax liability, and we would rather be explicit about that.

You do, and so is the merchant account. The subscription sits in your name, the gateway settles into your bank, and we never stand between you and your own money. Stop working with us and you keep every plan, every subscription and every invoice, with nothing to unwind. Zoho Assist is the one service where the license sits with us.

Yes, and we will ask you twice whether you should. Leaving a merchant of record means taking the tax obligation back, so before anything moves we work out which jurisdictions you have crossed thresholds in and what it costs to be compliant there. If that number is larger than the percentage you are saving, we will tell you to stay, and we have.

No. Five hundred a month, month to month, thirty days’ notice. Paddle has no lock in either, by their own FAQ, and says your data can be moved to another provider. On commitment the two of us are unusually well matched.

Then stay on Paddle, and we mean that. Registering, collecting and filing in thirty jurisdictions is a compliance function, not a software problem, and five percent is a reasonable price for not having one. Call us about the pricing itself if nobody owns it, and keep the merchant of record exactly where it is.

Some do. Once you consolidate several legal entities, carry inventory or manufacturing alongside the subscriptions, or need revenue recognition your auditors want evidenced rather than asserted, the ceiling is real and we will name it before you reach it.