2
8 Comments

Paddle or FastSpring or others?

Hi everyone,
I'm selling a digital product on a marketplace (Envato) and looking to switch to my own site and implement subscriptions.
I'm looking at some solutions and I could use your feedback.

  1. Paddle
    Very nice UI and nice checkout.
    What I don't like:
  • I get the feeling from reviews that basically they give refunds without consulting you and give refunds for any reason
  • Emails have a lot of Paddle branding
  • Slow support, it's been 4 days and no answer to questions
  1. FastSpring
    Are they better? At least I get the feeling they don't give out refunds for no reason.

Both seem to have no integration for software licensing/subscriptions and you need to do it yourself via API

Thank you.

posted to Icon for group Product Development
Product Development
on July 22, 2020
  1. 2

    I’ve compared Fastspring and Paddle a lot and decided to go with the latter 2.5 years ago.

    Paddle pros:

    • Did not experience big issues with infastructure and payments.
    • It looks nice.
    • There are lots of webhooks, functions etc. if you are a developer

    Cons:

    • Lacking lots of features by default. We had to integate ourselves, even very single things like Google Analytics and Mailchimp.
    • Support is kind of slow and not satisfying.
    • You cannot create variable products. Have to create as a separate product everything (even single variations)
    • They don’t handle the fullfilment and emails for subscriptions.

    Basically, Paddle has a tendency like “hey we provide you the hooks, filters, js API etc. so you are on your own figuring out your way” If you don’t have a skilled js developer you will be very limited with them.

    Now I am looking over Fastspring. They look like they provide most of those things by default. I am also curious about Fastspring experience of IH people (if any)

  2. 1

    I am using Paddle for 8+ months on https://mingo.io/ so far I am happy with them.

    • Support: Yes the support is slow, but I don't need it too often
    • API: so far no problems with it
    • customer portal: they don't offer any. So you need to implement thinks on your own... That is why I'm planning to build a service for this https://www.productf.it/customer-portal-for-paddle/
    • admin: I would welcome some additional features like (create unique checkout link)

    This being said, I'm looking at FastSpring and exploring / comparing them to Paddle. Not sure if I will migrate, need to dig into it a little bit more.

  3. 1

    What kind of products are you selling? One-time digital downloads or recurring ones? Happy to help if Memberstack might be helpful to you here 🙂 Twitter DMs/email are both open.

    1. 1

      Thanks Naitik
      I checked out Memberstack seems interesting, I'm interested in the gated content aspect because with Paddle I'd have to build that myself.

      • I'd like to sell both one-time and subscriptions (need to do some tests to see what converts best)

      • Are you guys Merchant of Record?

      1. 1

        Yep, you can sell both one-time & subscriptions on Memberstack — one limitation currently is that folks can only buy or subscribe to one membership plan at a time so if you're looking to sell 'quantities' of products, something like Gumroad might be a better option :)

        We use Stripe to process payments so I believe they'd be Merchant of Record.

        1. 1

          Hi are you resellers like paddle. Am looking for a solution like paddle since stripe payments are not supported in my country.

          1. 1

            Hi! We just offer user authentication integrated with Stripe payments for now.

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