Compared Stripe, Gumroad, Adyen, Paddle, Mollie 💰

Over the time I have built a couple of apps, but till earlier I had never implemented payments. It turns out the payments world is quite interesting and not easy to grasp.

I have compared the following ones:

• Stripe
• Gumroad
• Adyen
• Paddle
• Mollie

I used to have an online video store that sold for over 120K a year. It was a good experience to have and I have learned that admin work sucks (taxes/VAT, billing, and such).

My demands for a payment provider initially was to handle all this admin work for me. So Stripe looked interesting as they handle invoices and send them to my customers. Also, they have a package for the Laravel framework that I use.

While experimenting with Stripe, I found out there are some flaws with them:

• Yes, they handle payments and invoices, but not my tax admin or something like that (quarterly or monthly reporting in the Netherlands).
• While they do not do my VAT stuff, they also do not calculate the tax that my customers need to pay me.

Especially the latter one is interesting, there is a whole world of taxes if you want to do business all over the world! (probably something to write about in the future)
Now, there are some additional products for Stripe that you can buy to calculate VAT/taxes and such. But it sounded like a lot of work to get something started. Maybe if you are doing a couple of $K a month?

Looking at the others, I had two problems with Gumroad and Paddle. Gumroad seemed pretty cool, however, they do not allow to sell SaaS subscriptions as noted on their website (and were quite expensive). Paddle didn't publish any pricing on their website and I was in too much of a good dev flow to email them or something like that.

It also got me thinking, basically these companies are "pretending" to be me. So they are selling my products under their name. How are they sure that I am delivering and also that what I'm delivering is not crap. Next to this, how can I ensure that they do all the proper taxes that I am supposed to do? They say they will do it, but do I have any proof?

The next one was Adyen, well they only sell to big corporations. So continuing.

Last on my list was Mollie. This is a Dutch payment provider (like Adyen), so that is nice I think. They do have a Laravel package that I can use, although there are quite some bugs that need to be fixed, not really that major though. After some testing, I think they are fine for now. It is actually nice that I have all the invoices and overviews myself, so in time I can write an API to an admin system that can handle taxes and such.

Last but not least, I gave up on taxes that are automatically calculated. I just found out how to do it from the Netherlands and have written some code for it. It's quite ok if you are not selling to consumers, otherwise, you are basically in deep 💩

Hope this helps any of you that are implementing a payment provider and are looking for a comparison.