3 Key Benefits of FastSpring’s Trial Hopping Prevention Feature

1. It Prevents Abuse

Repeated exploitation of free trials can lead to revenue loss and skewed metrics, making it harder to gauge genuine interest in your product. FastSpring’s Trial Hopping Prevention feature helps prevent users from repeatedly accessing free trials, protecting the integrity of your trial strategy and supporting healthier subscription performance.

2. It Delivers a Fair Trial Experience

Providing a free trial should be about allowing genuine users to explore your product and determine if it’s right for them. Trial hopping can undermine this experience by filling your trial funnel with non-serious users. Trial hopping prevention helps maintain a fair experience for customers sincerely exploring your product.

3. It Encourages Conversions

When free trials are limited to genuine first-time use, users who see value in your product are more likely to upgrade to a paid subscription to maintain access. By restricting repeated free trials, this feature can help support better trial-to-paid conversion outcomes.

How Does the Trial Hopping Prevention Feature Work?

FastSpring’s Trial Hopping Prevention feature helps reduce repeated free-trial abuse by preventing the same email from being used for unlimited retrials, helping guide repeat trial attempts toward a paid plan instead. Businesses can enable the setting within their store’s subscription configuration as part of their broader subscription strategy.

Best Practices for Leveraging the Trial Hopping Prevention Feature

Communicate Clear Policies

Transparency is key to maintaining trust with your users. Clearly outline your trial policies, including any restrictions, in your terms of service and marketing materials. This helps set expectations and reduces the likelihood of misunderstandings.

Use Incentives to Encourage Upgrades

To complement the Trial Hopping Prevention feature, consider offering incentives such as discounts or bonuses for users who transition from a free trial to a paid subscription. Highlight the value of your paid plans, and demonstrate how they can enhance the user’s experience.

Monitor Trial Metrics

Track trial-to-paid conversion rates and analyze user behavior during trials. FastSpring’s Trials dashboard can help you monitor signup volume, conversion performance, and lifecycle trends so you can refine your trial strategy over time.

Combine With Other Retention Strategies

Pair the Trial Hopping Prevention feature with other retention-focused tools, such as Pause a Subscription or a cancellation survey, to maximize customer satisfaction and reduce churn.

Protect Your Business and Enhance Customer Experience

FastSpring’s Trial Hopping Prevention feature empowers businesses to maintain the integrity of their free trial offerings while supporting stronger conversion outcomes. By preventing abuse, ensuring fairness, and encouraging upgrades, this feature helps you deliver value to genuine users and protect your subscription revenue.

FAQs

Partner With FastSpring

FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment and subscription platform for thousands of SaaS, software, video games, and digital products businesses, including VAT, GST, and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. 

Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

The post Maximizing Subscription Value With FastSpring’s Trial Hopping Prevention Feature appeared first on FastSpring.

• Chargebee offers a number of subscription management features, but their customers are still responsible for handling key tasks like connecting to payment gateways, taxes, payment reconciliation, and chargebacks.
• As your merchant of record (MoR), FastSpring takes on the responsibility for these tasks, including payment processing, remitting taxes across jurisdictions, and more.
• Other Chargebee alternatives include Stripe, Maxio, Zoho Billing, Stax Bill, Zuora, Sticky.io, PayPal Enterprise Payments, Recurly, and Paddle.

Chargebee is a robust subscription management platform —  and if you’re looking for Chargebee alternatives, you’re likely already aware of many of its key features.

However, there are certain aspects of collecting recurring payments that you would still be responsible for when using Chargebee, such as:

• Connecting to payment gateways manually. While Chargebee supports several different payment gateways, you have to set up and configure each one.
• Remitting taxes at the end of the year. They will collect taxes for you, but you are ultimately held responsible for filing and paying taxes correctly within each jurisdiction you do business.
• Reconciling payments, fulfillment, refunds, etc. While Chargebee lets you automate many mundane accounting tasks and integrate with account software, you still have to track and record every transaction, refund, etc.
• Responding to and processing chargebacks. Chargebee only offers full chargeback support for limited vendors, so other vendors will need to manage chargebacks for themselves.

In this guide, we present 10 alternatives to Chargebee that help relieve some of these burdens for users, starting with an in-depth review of our solution, FastSpring. 

FastSpring handles the entire payment process from checkout to remitting end-of-year taxes for SaaS companies. To learn more about how FastSpring can help you scale quickly, sign up for a free account or request a demo today.

10 Chargebee Alternatives

1. FastSpring.
2. Stripe.
3. Maxio.
4. Zoho Billing.
5. Stax Bill.
6. Zuora.
7. Sticky.io.
8. PayPal Enterprise Payments.
9. Recurly.
10. Paddle.

1. FastSpring

As your merchant of record (MoR), FastSpring takes on the responsibility for payment processing, remitting taxes, and more for your software or SaaS business.

To compare, most Chargebee alternatives are either subscription billing platforms or payment gateways. 

Some of these providers may be able to help you connect to international payment gateways, alert you to chargebacks, and help you collect VAT and sales taxes. However, you’ll still be responsible for paying taxes, processing chargebacks, and for things like legal compliance, dunning, and more. 

FastSpring, on the other hand, handles everything from optimizing your checkout flow to remitting end-of-year taxes by acting as your merchant of record (MoR).

Next, we explain how an MoR is different from other payment service providers. 

What It Means to Have FastSpring as Your Merchant of Record

A merchant of record, or MoR, is the business entity that sells goods or services to the buyer. You can act as your own MoR, or you can outsource the entire process to FastSpring. Companies that haven’t thought about who their MoR is are probably acting as their own MoR.

When you outsource your transactions to FastSpring, your customers still visit your website to choose their software and/or subscription, but FastSpring takes over when the customer gets to the checkout. They’ll receive a receipt from FastSpring, and FastSpring will be listed on their bank or credit card statement.

The profits are yours, but FastSpring is the liable party for the sale.

That’s why FastSpring can do more than other types of service payment providers can:

• Collect and remit VAT, sales taxes, and other consumption taxes.
• Comply with local laws and regulations.
• Monitor chargebacks in real time.
• Reconcile transactions, payments, refunds, etc.
• And more, all on your behalf.

If something goes wrong with local or tax compliance, chargebacks, accounts not balancing, etc., FastSpring takes the lead to solve the issue on your behalf.

Instead of juggling multiple platforms and providers for a complete payment solution, you can work with just one provider: FastSpring. 

Plus, you can start selling in 200+ jurisdictions almost instantly — because we’ve already established the necessary processes in each region. You can learn more about how FastSpring helps you with international recurring payments here.

In summary, FastSpring focuses on the selling, so you can focus on making a great product.

In the next sections, we’ll dive deeper into how FastSpring helps you: 

• Create flexible free trials and recurring billing logic without code.
• Minimize payment failures with advanced payment routing and smart dunning.
• Increase conversions with branded, localized checkout.

We’ll also cover how FastSpring provides all features for one flat-rate price designed to fit your budget. 

Flexible No-Code Free Trials and Recurring Billing Logic

Not every business can use the same free trial model. Some businesses will see more success if they let customers sign up without payment details, while others will see more success if they require a payment method to sign up but don’t automatically charge the customer at the end of the trial.

Additionally, what worked for your small business to start may not be the right solution for you long term as you grow and adopt more complex billing. That’s why many software, gaming, digital product, mobile app, and SaaS companies need payment software that can support many different types of trial models, subscriptions, etc. 

However, most payment processors (sometimes interchangeably referred to as “payment gateways,” while technically being slightly different) only offer limited recurring billing and basic trial options — e.g., a free trial that automatically turns into monthly billing. This makes it difficult to optimize your trials and subscription plans for high conversions and what works best for your customers. It also makes it difficult to adapt as a business in the long run. 

FastSpring, on the other hand, delivers advanced features and a wide variety of flexible options for how you can set up trials, subscriptions, and more. Below, we provide an overview of FastSpring’s subscription management tools. 

Trial subscription options:

• Free or paid trial periods of any length.
• Set up free, paid, or usage-based trials.
• Choose whether or not to require a payment method when signing up for a trial.
• Choose to automatically bill the user after the trial has ended or let them manually start a paid subscription.
• Allow subscribers to reactivate expired trial accounts.
• Choose when FastSpring will send reminders of ending trials (e.g., three days before the trial ends).
• Offer a discounted trial period.
• Automatically detect when a single user tries to sign up for multiple trials, and only allow one trial account.
• And more.

Recurring billing options:

• Choose subscription frequency (weekly, monthly, yearly, or custom) and billing date (or let your customers choose).
• Set subscriptions to auto renewal, manual renewal (i.e., customers have to re-enter payment information each time they’re billed), or managed renewal (i.e., your team initiates the charge via the API, which is great for usage-based billing).
• Offer discounts and coupons.
• Allow prorated billing if a customer wants to upgrade, downgrade, or pause the service part-way through the billing cycle.
• Add one time purchases to the initial bill but not recurring billings.
• Manage upsell and cross-sell products at checkout.
• Give customers the option of whether or not to store payment information (or make the decision for all customers).
• Auto-renew to a different subscription.
• Offer subscription add-ons.
• And more.

Fulfillment options:

• Choose whether to share products and resources via a license key, product download, signed PDF, or email.
• Configure multiple fulfillment actions for one subscription (e.g., send a license key and product manual PDF via email).

FastSpring also provides your customers with an easy-to-access self-serve Customer Account Portal, where they can view their entire order history; upgrade, downgrade, or pause their subscriptions; and add or edit payment methods.

This self-serve portal is entirely managed by FastSpring but reflects the visual branding of your checkout for a cohesive and user-friendly interface and customer experience. 

Finally, some subscription management tools require a lot of technical skills to set up and use. 

But with ease of use in mind, FastSpring lets you set up many of the options mentioned above without code. If you have unique subscription management needs, you can also use our API and webhooks library for more control — our experienced developers are readily available to help you create the best solution for your subscription business model.

Don’t forget: Rules around recurring billing vary across the globe. Without a global MoR like FastSpring, it’s your responsibility to keep track of current and evolving local transaction laws and regulations and ensure your recurring billing model complies.

FastSpring handles this — and the liability for recurring transactions — for you.

Note: If you already have multiple subscriptions set up in another platform, we can help you easily migrate over to FastSpring. For subscription data migration with payment information included, click here for more info. For subscription data migration without payment information, click here for more info.

Advanced Payment Routing and Smart Dunning to Minimize Payment Failures

From the initial purchase to each subsequent rebill, failed payment is one of the main reasons for lost revenue.

Many payment service providers will automatically retry failed payments once or notify customers of failed payments. This is a good place to start, but there are more ways to meaningfully reduce involuntary churn due to failed payments. 

FastSpring helps you proactively minimize payment failures and reduce churn with flexible dunning management, which includes:

• Proactive reminders to update payment information (e.g., “Your subscription is due soon”).
• Multiple follow-up notifications (e.g., two, five, seven, 14, and 21 days after their payment method fails).
• A pre-made email template for reminders — or the ability to customize your own messages.
• Multiple payment retries before each follow-up notification is sent out.
• Automatic payment gateway rerouting (this solves many payment failures due to network or system errors.
• An intuitive self-serve portal (customers can easily update payment information from the same portal where they manage their subscription plan).

Plus, you can choose whether to pause or continue the service when a payment fails. If you keep the service going after a failed payment and give your customers a chance to update their payment information, you’ll have less churn and increase retention.

You can also choose to apply a pause rather than a full cancellation of their service after all reminders have been sent out. Pausing makes it easier for your customer to restart their subscription without the hassle of onboarding again.

You can read more about how one of our customers reduced churn by 50% in this case study. 

Branded, Localized Checkout to Increase Conversions

Friction at the purchase step can cause customers to fall off before completing a purchase. For example:

• If the price at checkout is different than it was on the website (e.g., different currency or different amount because additional fees have been added without a clear label), customers may decide not to buy.
• If the checkout is visually very different from the website, or if the checkout is on an entirely different website, the customer is less likely to believe the checkout is authentic and secure.
• If they have to create an account in order to purchase but don’t want to.
• If checkout translation and localization is incorrect, inconsistent, or missing, so the customer questions the store’s legitimacy.

These are just a few examples, but there are many reasons why a customer may decide against completing a purchase at the last minute.

FastSpring helps you anticipate objections and reduce friction at checkout in the following ways:

• Customizable checkout UI.
• The most popular payment methods.
• Local currency conversions and language translations.
• Conversion-optimized embedded, pop-up, or web storefront checkout experiences.
• Personalized developer support.

Read on for more details about each.

Customizable Checkout UI

Many subscription management platforms or payment processors only provide checkout templates where you can add your logo and choose basic color schemes. These solutions usually fail to match your visual branding and may not be optimized for increasing conversions. 

To create the best experience for your customers and get the highest conversion rates, you need more custom abilities.

FastSpring lets you customize the look and feel of your checkout with pre-built branding tools and CSS overrides. You have complete visual customization with our Store Builder Library (SBL), a JavaScript library that lets you customize, brand, and streamline your entire checkout workflow to build trust and eliminate friction throughout the buyer’s journey. This allows you to create the checkout experience that most aligns with your brand and highlights your product. 

The Most Popular Payment Methods

One of the biggest reasons customers fail to complete a purchase is because they can’t use their preferred payment method. 

However, offering different payment methods isn’t as simple as adding their logo to your checkout screen. 

You have to agree to certain terms and conditions before a payment network or issuing bank will approve transactions with your business. Each payment provider will have different regulations regarding fraud, chargebacks, privacy protection, etc. It can be a huge task to stay in good standing with many different payment providers on your own. 

If you want to transact internationally, there will be even more to manage.

While Visa and Mastercard may be popular payment methods in the U.S., buyers in other countries prefer different payment methods. To convert international customers, you need to provide many different types of preferred payment methods — which means more payment providers to maintain. 

For instance, Pix is a preferred payment method in Brazil, while AliPay is a preferred payment method in China.

FastSpring takes care of all of this — from staying in good standing with payment networks, to managing fraud and chargebacks — for you.

FastSpring already has good relationships with many different payment networks and issuing banks around the world, which means you can accept your customers’ preferred payment methods right away. 

Local Currency Conversions and Language Translations

Customers are more likely to trust a checkout experience that uses the same language and currency as what’s shown on your website. That’s why FastSpring lets you translate checkout into the local language and convert prices to the local currency. 

You can let each buyer select their preferred language from a dropdown menu featuring 21+ supported languages. Or, you can lock the language and FastSpring will automatically select the appropriate language based on the buyer’s location. 

You also have the option to set custom pricing strategies in each currency or let FastSpring automatically convert prices to the local currency (FastSpring supports 23+ currencies).

If you choose to let FastSpring convert product prices for you, we match the format of the original price. For example, if the original price is $12.99 and the conversion to Euros is €14.29, FastSpring would change it to €14.99.

Learn how Nelio increased growth by 50% with localized checkout in this case study.

Embedded, Pop-Up, or Web Storefront Checkout

With FastSpring, you can embed checkout directly on your website, insert a pop-up checkout, or send customers to a secure web storefront managed by FastSpring. This gives you the flexibility to choose the solution that’s best for your team and customers.

To compare, embedding checkout directly on your webpage ensures less disruption and typically decreases the likelihood of your buyers abandoning. Pop-up checkout requires less setup — simply insert a few lines of pre-written HTML and Javascript in your webpage.

Learn how DaisyDisk was able to spend less time managing their checkout while significantly increasing conversions by using FastSpring’s pop-up checkout, in this case study. 

To outsource the entire checkout process to FastSpring, you can choose the web storefront option.

With the web storefront option, customers will be redirected to a webpage entirely managed by FastSpring — but customized to match your visual brand identity — where they can view their cart and complete the purchase.

Personalized Developer Support

Many payment service providers only help with the initial setup and when something goes wrong with the software. Some companies only provide personalized support to their largest clients. This leaves you on your own to manage ongoing payment operations.

FastSpring is dedicated to providing you with the best experience throughout the entire engagement.

Our team is always available to help — regardless of how big or small your operation is. Whether that’s helping you build the best checkout experience for your business or expanding into a new region, our friendly customer support team will help you find and build out the best solutions for your business.

Robust Analytics and Reporting Dashboards

FastSpring’s Reporting and Analytics is a robust suite of reports and visualizations to keep you informed of important stats such as MRR, churn rate, new customers by product type, and more. 

For example, our Subscription Overview dashboard shows key subscription analytics including subscription churn, subscriber loss, MRR churn rate, active customers, and more. 

Use our Subscription Overview dashboard, Revenue dashboard, data export reporting and data API features, and more to better understand:

• How each product contributes to your bottom line. 
• When customers are most likely to drop off.
• What coupons or promotions are working.
• How individual trials are performing.
• Which subscription models generate the most revenue.
• Where your customers are located.
• What currencies and payment methods customers prefer.
• Chargeback rates by customer segment.
• Chargeback rates by product line.
• The status of your active webhooks.
• And much more.

All-in-One Pricing Without the Need for Additional Software

Chargebee separates its Billing features into three pricing plans, so you may eventually need the most expensive plan to get the features you need. For example, chargeback automation is not offered in Chargebee’s Starter plan. 

Plus, you’ll still have to pay for additional software solutions like payment gateways (sometimes interchangeably referred to as “payment processors,” although they are technically different) or tax software for a complete payment management system. Even with seamless integrations, it’s a hassle, an additional cost, and may even require additional headcount to manage it all. 

FastSpring, on the other hand, offers one flat-rate price that includes the entire platform — every feature and all services. Our team works with you to find an affordable price based on the volume of transactions you move through FastSpring (you’ll only be charged when successful transactions take place).

If you think FastSpring could be the right payment solution for your subscription-based business, sign up for a free account or request a demo today.

2. Stripe

Stripe’s main service is payment processing; however, they do offer a few other services, such as: 

• Checkout.
• Fraud and risk management.
• Automated invoicing.
• In-person payments.
• Subscription management.
• Virtual and physical card issuing.
• Business spend management.

Stripe billing has fewer options than Chargebee for recurring billing, but you can easily integrate the two software solutions if you want to use (and pay for) both. Stripe works with companies of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises. 

3. Maxio

Maxio (formerly Chargify and SaasOptics) is another cloud-based financial operations platform for B2B SaaS. They offer solutions to automate financial systems on the back end, and features to help improve the order-to-revenue process. Their main services include: 

• Subscription management.
• Usage-based and global billing.
• Revenue recognition and revenue management tools.
• Billing system dashboard and metrics.
• Built-in integrations with various other software (e.g., accounting software such as QuickBooks and Xero).
• International payment gateways.

Maxio advertises their ability to accommodate any go-to-market strategy (such as product-led or sales-led approaches).

4. Zoho Billing

Zoho offers a large suite of software to run your business, from a CRM and ERPs to a video meeting platform. Zoho Billing (formerly Zoho Subscriptions) is their payment processing and recurring billing solution. Some of their key features include: 

• Invoicing and invoice templates.
• Multi-currency support.
• 50+ pre-built analytic reports.
• Automatic online payment retries.
• Out-of-the-box integrations with other billing platforms (e.g., Stripe, PayPal, etc.).

Zoho Billing offers more pre-made solutions than other options on this list, which some companies may find limiting. However, Zoho Billing may be a good choice if you’re already embedded in the Zoho ecosystem.

5. Stax Bill 

Stax Bill (formerly Fusebill) provides subscription management software and a payment gateway in one platform. Other than offering a payment gateway with each plan, Fusebill offers many of the same features as Chargebee, including: 

• Dunning management.
• Flexible recurring billing options.
• Recurring revenue recognition features.
• Billing analytics.

Fusebill also offers flexible catalog pricing and inventory tracking tools. 

6. Zuora

Zuora is a monetization platform for B2C and B2B companies. Zuora’s key functionalities include: 

• Customer subscription management.
• Revenue reconciliation tools.
• Revenue analytics.
• Built-in integrations with lots of business software.
• Low-code SDKs and APIs to build your own integrations.
• Quoting software.

Zuora provides a lot of flexibility for building out your own solution on top of their platform; however, non-developers may find it difficult to manage.

7. Sticky.io

Sticky.io (formerly Limelight) is a subscription management platform that integrates with popular ecommerce platforms such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud, BigCommerce, and Shopify. They advertise the ability to: 

• Support nearly any subscription or pricing model.
• Create coupons, discounts, and special promotions.
• Offer add-ons, upsells, etc.
• Fight fraud and chargebacks.
• Manage automated dunning.

Like Chargebee, Sticky.io doesn’t provide a payment gateway; however, they do offer pre-built integrations with several payment gateways. 

8. PayPal Enterprise Payments

PayPal Enterprise Payments (formerly Braintree by PayPal) is a payment gateway provider that also provides merchant accounts. Other features include: 

• Subscription billing management.
• Optimized checkout flow.
• Flexible risk mitigation options.
• Reporting and analytics.
• Third-party integrations for recurring billing, accounting, and more.

PayPal Enterprise Payments supports payment from PayPal, Venmo (in the U.S.), Apple Pay, and Google Pay.

9. Recurly

Recurly is a subscription management software and recurring billing platform. Recurly offers features such as:

• Multiple pricing models.
• Item catalog.
• Recurring billing.
• Payments orchestration.
• Subscriber management.
• Churn management.
• Reporting dashboards and analytics.

Like Chargebee, Recurly doesn’t include a native payment gateway, but the platform does offer pre-built integrations with popular gateways such as Stripe, PayPal, Authorize.net, and more. Recurly also allows you to connect multiple gateways.

10. Paddle

Paddle is another Chargebee alternative that’s an MoR with a subscription billing platform, appropriate for use by SaaS and software companies. Paddle has features including: 

• Multiple payment gateways.
• Secure checkout.
• Recurring billing management.
• A robust payments toolkit.
• Fraud protection.
• Transaction and subscription reporting.
• Invoicing. 
• And more.

Learn more about Paddle alternatives.

Frequently Asked Questions About Chargebee Alternatives

What’s the Difference Between Chargebee and FastSpring?

In short: Chargebee is a subscription management platform for SaaS companies, while FastSpring is an all-in-one payments and digital commerce platform (and merchant of record) built for digital-first businesses.

Who Are the Top Competitors to Chargebee in 2025?

Top Chargebee competitors include:

• FastSpring.
• Stripe.
• Maxio.
• Zoho Billing.
• Stax Bill.
• Zuora.
• Sticky.io.
• PayPal Enterprise Payments.
• Recurly.
• Paddle.

What Should I Consider When Choosing a Subscription Management Platform to Replace Chargebee?

The most important considerations include:

• Your business size, industry, and transaction volume.
• Support for localization and preferred payment methods in the jurisdictions where your customers live.
• Integrations with other tools in your payments and tech stack.
• Security and compliance.
• Budget, costs, and scalability.
• Customer support.

How Difficult Is It to Migrate From Chargebee to Another Platform?

In short, the complexity of migrating from Chargebee to another platform depends heavily on factors including:

• Your current Chargebee setup.
• The complexity of your subscription model.
• The platform you’re migrating to.

If you’re looking to migrate from Chargebee to FastSpring, FastSpring can import your subscriptions with payment details or without payment details. Either way, our team is always available to help — regardless of how big or small your operation is.

Need a Chargebee Alternative for Your SaaS, Software, Video Games, or Other Digital Products Business?

FastSpring can help!

Instead of managing a large software stack for just the subscription lifecycle, let FastSpring handle all of payment lifecycle management for you. FastSpring is more than a subscription management platform — we’re the merchant of record for global SaaS companies and many other digital businesses. 

Sign up for a free account or request a demo today.

This post was originally published in December 2022 and has been updated.

The post Chargebee Alternatives in 2025: 10 Competitors and How They Differ appeared first on FastSpring.

After four great shows in Singapore, gamescom asia has moved to Bangkok, Thailand, where it will maximize its value and impact by joining forces with Thailand Game Show.

This new powerhouse mega-event will be the biggest B2B2C platform for the games industry in Southeast Asia — and one of the biggest in the world. 

Notable features include an industry gaming conference, an expansive business area, and an exciting entertainment area designed to bring together gaming industry professionals, publishers, and fans.

The Queen Sirikit National Convention Center, Bangkok, Thailand is hosting gamescom asia x Thailand Game Show 2025 on October 16-19.

Where to Get Tickets

Still need tickets? Head over to the registration page to grab your ticket and get access to presentations by industry heavyweights, publisher and investor networking opportunities, a B2B networking app, cosplay and meet & greet events, and so much more.

How to Connect With FastSpring

FastSpring’s industry experts will be available to chat in person at booth C13 in the business hall.

Want to book a 1:1 session or product demo ahead of the event? Request a demo here.

Join us in Bangkok and unlock your game’s full potential with direct web monetization.

FastSpring is how gaming publishers sell in more places around the world. For nearly two decades, FastSpring has been a trusted payment provider you can use to sell games or in-game items on your website, web shop, or embedded directly into your game with fully customizable and branded checkouts just for you. FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, sales tax and VAT compliance, player payments support, and many other aspects of payments management. Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time making great games! To learn more about how FastSpring supports game developers, visit fastspring.gg/. 

The post FastSpring Is Sponsoring gamescom asia x Thailand Game Show 2025 appeared first on FastSpring.

If you look just underneath the surface, you find annual recurring revenue (ARR) telling you who showed up to make a purchase. Dig a little deeper and you’re going to find net revenue retention (NRR) which tells you who stayed long-term.

By focusing on optimizing your net revenue retention rate in addition to ARR, you can supercharge revenue, reduce customer acquisition costs, and even boost your valuation.

Below, we’ll cover:

• What NRR is and how it differs from ARR.
• Why you should optimize for both.
• How FastSpring can help with both ARR and NRR.

If you’ve been looking at payment services providers but want a more comprehensive merchant of record to help you grow your business internationally, we can help. FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video games, and digital products businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Interested? Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

What Is NRR?

Net recurring revenue is a measure of how well a company has retained and grown revenue from current customers. 

This is different from ARR because ARR is a measure of total recurring revenue (annualized) from current customers without accounting for the growth of current customers the way that NRR does.

A simple NRR calculation is to divide your total recurring revenue by the starting recurring revenue over a specific period.

ARR and NRR: Two Sides of the Same Engine

Most digital product and SaaS companies track annual recurring revenue, which is an annualized figure showing the predictable revenue streams from your subscribers. 

Imagine you’re on a road trip — that’s your business journey and it’s made up of two parts: ARR and NRR.

ARR tells you how many users said yes to your product. It’s like inviting people on a road trip and your users are the ones who said ‘yes’.

But you’re not only interested in filling up the seats in the car. NRR tells you if your users keep saying yes after their initial purchase. It’s like how long your passengers ride along and if they start pitching in for gas.

ARR is motion. NRR is momentum.

You can accelerate fast and close deals quickly, but NRR shows if customers are comfortable enough on the ride to pitch in for snacks, take scenic detours, or explore additional routes and services.

NRR reveals if your product continues delivering value when no one’s watching. It measures whether what you’ve built truly holds up out on the open road.

In short, ARR gets you started, but NRR keeps you going. To build lasting growth, companies need both metrics working together. One showing how effectively you’re acquiring customers, and the other how well you’re retaining and expanding on those relationships. Balancing motion and momentum means knowing not just which users said yes, but which users continue to say yes — and why.

Why Both ARR and NRR Are So Important for Growth

While ARR tells you how effectively you get people to join your road trip, NRR is the fine print telling you how your product fits within their world. It’s about upsells, churn, and the overall health of your product.

Growth isn’t just about getting new customers — it’s about proactively working to maintain, nurture, and expand accounts. It’s ensuring that the current customers coming on the trip also settle in, turn up the music, and plan to stay.

So for anyone building or growing a product, embracing both ARR and NRR together is the magic formula for long-term, sustainable growth. NRR doesn’t care about drag racing to win new customers — it cares about keeping existing customers on a steady journey for the long haul.

What Signs to Watch For, and Why ARR + NRR Matters

ARR measures your company’s ability to acquire new customers effectively, while NRR provides deeper insight into how well your products continue to deliver value over time. When you measure ARR and NRR, there are some key things to keep an eye out for:

Is NRR on the Rise?

A rising NRR signals genuine product-market fit and customers are expanding services without being pushed. This momentum is only possible when the foundation set by ARR is strong and the experience post-sale holds up.

Use this signal to double down on what’s working:

• Identify which products, features, customer segments, or behaviors correlate with growth and build around them.
• Reinforce post-sale engagement to help more customers reach value faster. Double down on education, proactive support, product training, and other customer success levers to help your entire user base be successful.
• Create a growth potential playbook based on the successful customer journey and use it to inform lifecycle marketing, upsell triggers, and even product roadmap decisions.
• Turn your high NRR into new sales by capturing and sharing testimonials, case studies, and usage benchmarks to show future users what ongoing value looks like.

Keep in mind: rapid ARR growth can mask churn. Monitor your leading indicators like support tickets, feature usage, NPS, and be ready to intervene early. Growth hides churn… until it doesn’t.

Is NRR Declining?

A declining NRR isn’t just a retention rate problem. It’s a signal that your growth engine is leaking. You might be adding ARR through new customers, but without retention and expansion, that growth won’t compound.

If you’re having growth troubles, address it early with a structured approach:

• Dive into your data to look for patterns. Break down customer churn by segment, product usage, and support history. Look for spikes in cancellations, stalled renewals, or downgrades.
• Speak with churned and at-risk customers to understand what changed and use feedback to improve. Use this feedback to validate your hypothesis from your data or as an indicator to do more research.
• Look to improve your customer retention levers like onboarding, self-serve resources, and engaging inactive users. Customer growth can be largely impacted by feeling supported throughout the entire lifecycle, not just at product delivery.
• Consider changing your product positioning or packaging. Sometimes you’ve got the right product, but user expectations aren’t being met. If you’re seeing feedback that users aren’t getting the value they expected, it might be a sign that you need to change up messaging in sales, pricing, and onboarding.

In today’s SaaS business landscape, where customer acquisition costs (CAC) are climbing, budgets are tightening, and buyers are increasingly selective, ARR alone won’t fuel growth. When ARR and NRR work together, you not only acquire customers — you keep them, grow them, and build a business that runs on compounding growth.

How FastSpring Helps Grow ARR + NRR

FastSpring is built to power overall SaaS growth, and that includes features to help optimize for both ARR and NRR.

How FastSpring Helps With ARR

• Reducing checkout friction, making it easier for new customers to buy.
• Preventing endless free trials and trial abuse.

Make It Easier for New Customers to Try and Buy

On the ARR front, FastSpring makes it easier to get new customers on board. With customizable trial options, you can build a free trial that works for both your business and your customer base.

You can collect payment details upfront (during checkout) and automatically bill after trial completion, or opt for a cardless free trial. Cardless free trials remove friction from the trial checkout process and minimize perceived risk on the customer’s end, often yielding higher trial signups.

Imagine this: A customer who’s shopped with you before comes back to your store. They saved their payment information the first time around, so with FastSpring’s 1ClickPay feature, they can now pay with just one click — no need to reenter card details. Just one click, and their purchase is on its way.

This reduces checkout friction and makes it supremely easy to buy, on the customer’s end, and it means higher conversation rates and more revenue growth for your business.

Prevent Endless Free Trials

FastSpring customers have the option to enable Trial Hopping Prevention, which prevents trial users from accessing multiple cardless free trials with the same email address. Users who attempt to start a new free trial with one already in progress (or recently expired) are blocked and encouraged to add a payment method and choose a paid upgrade.

This helps to mitigate trial abuse, boost free-to-paid conversions, and cut down on new customer acquisition costs.

How FastSpring Helps With NRR

• Closely monitor subscriptions.
• Make the most of every customer interaction.

Closely Monitor Subscriptions

Understanding your customers is the number one key to higher NRR, and that means you need to be able to proactively monitor a lot more than just revenue and churn. FastSpring offers an in-depth Subscription Overview and Revenue Recognition dashboard that can help here.

Think of it like your business’ subscription reporting command center. The dashboard covers the most important subscription and SaaS metrics:

• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR).
• Active customers.
• Active subscriptions.
• Cancellations.
• MRR churn rate.
• Active trials.
• Lifetime value (LTV).

Plus, you can dig even deeper by filtering your MRR data by date, product, country, coupon or discount, relationship type, and more. 

Keep drilling down to dive into:

• Contraction: MRR lost to cancellations and downgrades.
• Existing: MRR from existing customers who haven’t changed their subscriptions.
• Activation: MRR contribution from new customers.
• Expansions: MRR contribution from upgrades by existing customers.

Another great tool for boosting NRR is our Subscription Account Transfer API. It allows you to empower your customers to manage transfer of subscription ownership securely and easily. Whether you’re moving subscriptions due to a change in role, merging duplicate profiles, or because of employee turnover, the Subscription Account Transfer API allows you to automate subscription transfers at scale.

Make the Most of Every Customer Interaction

Picture this: You have a new customer, and they’ve bought something from you — is that the end of the road? Boosting NRR is about what comes next. It’s about guiding customers after that first purchase — say, suggesting products that go well with what they’ve already bought, or nudging them toward a premium subscription. In other words, it’s about upselling and cross-selling — not just to increase your total revenue (though it will do that), but to help make the customer’s experience richer, build loyalty, and retain customers for the long term.

FastSpring’s Product Offers API Suite can help you make the most of every customer interaction with targeted and personalized upsells, cross-sells, and even downsells. Combined with our reporting dashboards, you can see overall key metrics for your subscription products, and then use the Product Offers API suite to target users with value-based upsells. 

Specifically, with the API, you can create and edit product offerings — and showcase these offers right in your customers’ account management portal. The API helps to match the right product to the right customer. It’s a win-win: You see improved ROI and additional revenue, and your customers see an enhanced, more personalized experience and an easier way to manage subscriptions.

Supercharge Your Company Growth With FastSpring

Proactively building to improve both ARR and NRR is about much more than crafting features or pulling in new users. It’s a journey of constant evolution, iterating, and seeking to truly understand what your users need — and how that changes over time — and then bringing them something that genuinely adds value to their lives.

When developing products and navigating the market’s twists and turns, remember that growth and nurturing go hand in hand. That’s where you find a product that doesn’t just exist but lives, breathes, and resonates for years to come.

If you’ve been looking at payment services providers but want a more comprehensive merchant of record to help you grow your business internationally, we can help. FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video games, and digital products businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support.

Interested? Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

The post ARR vs. NRR: How These Paired Subscription Metrics Actually Drive Business Growth appeared first on FastSpring.

In recent years, mobile app developers have pushed back against marketplace fees that take up 15% to 30% of their revenue. Netflix, Spotify, and Fortnite all removed in-app subscriptions or payments to encourage users to buy on their websites instead. At its peak, Netflix alone was paying Apple an estimated $700,000 per day in fees just for offering subscriptions through the App Store.

Smaller app developers are following suit and are reaping the benefits as a result. While many aren’t removing in-app payments entirely, they are employing strategies to steer users to their websites for better user acquisition and mobile app monetization rather than relying on a middleman to do it for them.

What Are Web Subscriptions?

Web subscriptions–sometimes called web monetization–are the act of offering subscriptions for your mobile app directly from your website, instead of or in addition to in-app via app marketplaces. 

When users buy subscriptions through your website, you control the checkout, collect payment details, and avoid marketplace fees—boosting your margins. You also own the customer relationship, manage subscriptions directly, and gain access to conversion data for targeted acquisition campaigns that app marketplaces don’t actively support..

Many companies partner with a merchant of record like FastSpring to handle payments, tax compliance, and subscription operations end to end.

Why Should Mobile App Companies Offer Web Subscriptions?

By category, subscriptions are playing a bigger role than ever. Notably on Apple’s App Store, non-game app spending is on track to overtake games. Sensor Tower forecasts that non-game app revenue will outpace in-game revenue at $107B vs $78B in 2025.

As such, the revenue and desire from users to use subscriptions is already there. The most proactive companies are using web subscriptions to not only increase revenue share, but to improve customer acquisition.

Open Up User Acquisition Analytics by Linking Ads to Your Website

Direct user relationships also open up the opportunity to run user acquisition (UA) campaigns that give more power back to you, the developer.

Many mobile app companies currently run UA campaigns that link only to App Store pages. They get more users into their apps this way, but the trade off is giving the marketplace most of their user data. Attribution is therefore limited, and it’s much harder to know which ads are performing, which channels are driving sign ups, and how to optimize your ad spend.

By instead driving ad traffic to your own website, you regain visibility into this crucial part of your users’ journey. You can collect first-party data such as traffic source, session behavior, conversion rate, MRR, and much more, all directly attributable to your campaigns. You also avoid the signal loss that happens when players only interact within the marketplace ecosystem.

With stronger attribution, you can then refine your targeting, optimize creatives, and allocate budget to the channels that drive the most revenue.

Boost Revenue With Web Subscriptions

Each time a user transacts within the App Store or Play Store there’s a fee–often 30%. That’s a significant share of your revenue lost before you ever see a deposit into your account, limiting your ability to reinvest in your business and ultimately, grow.

Web subscriptions reduce that cost nearly immediately. If you offer users the ability to purchase through your website with a partner like FastSpring, you typically pay about 6% in fees, including processing and infrastructure. That difference–24% or more per transaction–adds up fast.

Let’s take a look at an example of a business offering web subscriptions in addition to in-app purchases:

By shifting just 25% of transactions to the web, this business would see $60,000 in monthly profit, or $720,000 annually. If you grow or migrate more volume to web subscriptions, that number scales quickly.

And these benefits don’t just apply to bottom line revenue. Alongside better margins per transaction, leveraging web subscriptions, mobile app companies can create a direct relationship with their users which leads to attribution data and ultimately the ability to reinvest confidently in the channels that deliver the highest return.

Establish a Direct Relationship With Users

One of the most vital parts of web subscriptions is that when you sell directly to your users, you aren’t just driving more revenue. You’re also building a direct relationship with your users.

The reality today is, nobody follows their meditation app on social media, few users are joining a discord for their video editing app, and users aren’t signing up for a newsletter from their favorite messaging app. Plus, with different platform access points like mobile, web, tablet, and elsewhere your user base is fragmented at best.

Without a unifying backbone behind those platforms, you don’t have a real relationship with your users. Nor do you have a way to market to them.

By creating a web store offering web subscriptions and account management, you unlock a direct line of communication instead of “renting” your audience from app marketplaces. You control your channels, your data, and ultimately, your user relationships. A direct user relationship means you can market to them and engage with them as they use your app across different platforms, today and into the future.

With direct user access, you can leverage marketing tactics such as retargeting pixels, targeted social ad campaigns, community-driven advocacy, and more. All of these tools let you connect with your users regardless of the platform they engage on, drive boosted conversion rates, and build brand loyalty over time. And according to a Harvard study, increasing retention (via loyalty) by just 5% delivers between 25% to 95% higher profits over time.

Web Subscriptions are More Common (and Stickier Than Ever)

The most successful mobile app companies are already offering web subscriptions, and it’s paying off. Even a few years ago, it would have been unorthodox to consider offering subscriptions outside of an app, but now, web store purchase flows have been normalized and users are more convinced of the value of making subscription purchases on your site instead of through the app stores.

Plus, in the US, mobile app companies are allowed to steer users to their websites directly from in-app on iOS. What does that mean? Users are learning about a channel that was previously difficult to find and mobile app developers who were ready are already reaping the benefits.

As more users get used to subscribing via your website, linking ads directly to your web store becomes a natural part of the funnel, reducing friction and improving ROI via customer acquisition.

Web Subscriptions Are Already Allowed — and Growing Fast

For years, many app developers assumed that offering web subscriptions was against marketplace terms of service, and users were unfamiliar with purchase flows outside of the app store. But, that’s not true at all.

Under current terms of service, offering web subscriptions to your users is allowed and on iOS, you’re even allowed to steer users from in-app directly to your website to make a purchase if they’re buying from the US.

And, regulatory shifts in the EU (Digital Markets Act) and Japan (Smartphone Act) mandate broader support for third-party payments and alternative app stores. Brazil is following closely, with active investigations and legislation proposals aimed at reducing marketplace control and giving power back to developers and users.

The Time for Web Subscriptions Is Now — Partner With FastSpring

Offering web subscriptions on your website is a no brainer. Revenue goes up, you own more user data, and open up the ability to market to your users. Plus, when you partner with FastSpring, you get access to our varied subscription capabilities including:

• Subscription management APIs
• Coupons and discount services
• The most popular payment methods used around the world
• Instant currency localization
• Managed tax compliance across the globe
• …and more.

If you have questions about how to start offering web subscriptions, or want to learn more about how FastSpring can help you drive business growth, set up a call with one of our industry experts today to get started.

The post The Rise of Mobile App Monetization: Building a Case for Direct Web Subscriptions appeared first on FastSpring.

Our latest product release further enhances the modularity of our subscription services by adding to our library of composable subscription tools. From easy account transfers to smarter discounts, all of our subscription upgrades give you more control over how you operate your subscription business.

Here’s a list of some key updates in our Summer 2025 release, including:

• Manual Subscription Renewal Invoice API
• Manual to Automatic Subscription Conversion
• Subscription Account Transfer API
• Apply Later Discounts
• Revenue Recognition Dashboard
• … and more.

Hybrid Subscription Management Capabilities Drive Composable Commerce

FastSpring’s hybrid subscription management approach gives you the freedom to build subscription workflows exactly how you want. Whether you’re using Salesforce or Hubspot as your CRM or are integrating with another backend system, FastSpring is able to integrate directly and handles billing, renewals, and payments behind the scenes.

Features like Managed Subscriptions provide core billing logic, while our Invoice API, Proforma Invoice, and Renewal Invoice capabilities enable precise control over your invoicing and billing workflows. This hybrid approach lets you centralize your subscription data  and customer touchpoints within your CRM while using FastSpring to handle billing, renewals, and payments securely and at scale.

Learn more about our hybrid subscription management capabilities

Subscription Account Transfer

With our Subscription Account Transfer API, empower your customers to manage transfer of subscription ownership securely and easily. Whether moving subscriptions to change in role, merging duplicate profiles, or due to employee turnover, the Subscription Account Transfer API allows you to automate subscription transfers at scale.

• Flexible transfers between new or existing accounts
• Automated validation and detailed logging
• Secure by design—no payment methods transferred

Learn More about Subscription Account Transfer (Planned to launch Mid-August 2025)

Manual Subscription Renewal Invoice

Make renewals predictable for customers who opt into manual renewals. Our renewal invoices enable you to automatically generate invoices so users can proactively pay at renewal without support intervention.

• Sales-assisted or self-service initiation
• Supports mid-cycle plan changes with proration capabilities
• Clear, formal invoices to improve cash flow

Learn More about Manual Subscription Renewal Invoice (Planned to launch Mid-August 2025)

Manual to Auto Pay Conversions

Reduce churn by letting users switch from manual to auto-renew in just a few clicks. With Manual to Automatic Subscription Conversion, your users can either opt-in to automatic subscriptions in the FastSpring-hosted account management portal, or in yours via our embedded widget.

• FastSpring-hosted or seller-hosted workflows
• Built-in payment capture
• Frictionless upgrade to auto-renewal

Learn More about Manual to Auto Subscription Conversions (Planned to launch End of Q3 2025)

Apply Later Discounts

Drive subscription upgrades and retention by offering flexible discount timing with our Apply Later Discounts. Apply Later Discounts allow you to schedule incentives for a future billing cycle, supporting smarter pricing campaigns without disrupting current terms.

• Offer discounts now or at next renewal
• Perfect for winbacks, plan upgrades, and retention offers

Learn More about Apply Later Discounts (Available Now!)

Revenue Recognition Dashboard

Track recognized revenue with precision with our Revenue Recognition Dashboard. Our updated dashboards deliver both stacked bar charts and sortable tables so you can analyze trends, filter by product, and export data with ease.

Learn More about Revenue Recognition Dashboard (Available Now!)

With our latest features, and many more, FastSpring delivers a truly composable subscription commerce platform where every workflow, pricing model, and customer interaction can be tailored to your unique business goals. Whether you’re scaling self-service SaaS, exploring web monetization for your mobile app, or managing complex B2B subscriptions, FastSpring gives you the tools to build the experience your users expect. Schedule some time with FastSpring today.

The post Build a Subscription Experience Designed for Your Business With FastSpring’s Latest Subscription Feature Launches appeared first on FastSpring.

Here’s an in-depth look at how this feature works and why it’s beneficial.

6 Key Benefits of FastSpring’s Subscription Pause Feature

1. Flexibility for Customers

Life can be unpredictable, and sometimes, customers temporarily may not need or be able to afford a service. The subscription pause feature allows them to disable billing and services temporarily without canceling their subscription. This flexibility builds trust and shows that your business values customer needs.

2. Retention Strategy

Rather than losing customers permanently due to cancellations, the pause feature provides an alternative. By allowing customers to pause their subscriptions, businesses can retain them over the long term, improving customer lifetime value and reducing churn rates.

3. Automatic Resumption

Once a pause is initiated, subscriptions automatically resume on the configured date. This eliminates the need for customers to take additional action, making the process seamless and ensuring service continuity when they’re ready to return.

4. Customization Options

FastSpring’s subscription pause feature is highly customizable, allowing businesses to:

• Define the maximum pause duration.
• Determine whether customers can initiate pauses themselves or require assistance.
• Tailor the experience to match their subscription model and customer needs.

5. Reduced Churn

By providing an alternative to cancellations, businesses can significantly reduce churn rates. Customers facing temporary financial constraints or changes in service needs are more likely to return after a pause than if they had canceled altogether.

6. Improved Customer Experience

Offering a pause option demonstrates empathy and understanding of your customers’ challenges, or of even just their usage habits and expectations. Offering a pause feature enhances their overall experience and strengthens their loyalty to your brand. 

For example, a November 2024 Wall Street Journal article cites an Antenna report showing that the rate of streaming service subscribers who canceled one year and rejoined the next increased from a median of 29.8% in 2022 to 34.2% in 2023. Since more and more people may be regularly stopping subscriptions and then rejoining later, making the process easier for your customers can foster goodwill and loyalty, ultimately improving retention.

How to Implement FastSpring’s Subscription Pause Feature

Step 1: Configure Pause Settings

• Within your FastSpring account, configure the subscription pause settings to align with your business strategy. 
• Decide on the maximum allowable pause duration and whether customers can initiate pauses themselves. (This configuration setting allows you to choose the number of bill periods the customer can pause for.)

Step 2: Customer Communication

• Clearly communicate the pause option to your customers. Highlight the benefits, such as avoiding cancellation fees or preserving their subscription benefits upon resumption. The number of billing cycles for which a subscription can be paused is configurable, but it must be set in advance.
• If the pause feature is not enabled for customers, only sellers can pause subscriptions.
• The pause applies only to the configured number of billing cycles, and this setting must be saved in the subscription’s configuration.

Step 3: Monitor Paused Subscriptions

FastSpring provides webhooks to monitor and manage paused subscriptions. Use these to identify trends or common accounts, such as common pause durations or reasons for pauses, and refine your strategies accordingly. (FastSpring sends webhooks when a subscription is paused or updated to resume, such as subscription.paused and subscription.updated.)

Step 4: Leverage Automated Notifications

Set up automated email notifications to:

• Confirm the pause request.
• Remind customers when their subscription is about to resume.
• Offer incentives, such as discounts or bonuses, to encourage early resumption.

A Win-Win for Businesses and Customers

The subscription pause feature is a powerful tool that benefits both businesses and customers. By reducing churn, improving customer retention, and enhancing the overall experience, it positions your business for long-term success. Customers, in turn, appreciate the flexibility and understanding, fostering loyalty and trust. A “Pause” option reduces churn by catching these “non-permanent” cancellations.

Buyers feel less pressure and more positive about the brand, leading to higher lifetime value (LTV).

Start leveraging FastSpring’s subscription pause feature today and give your customers the flexibility they need while ensuring your business thrives in the subscription economy.

Are you looking for a merchant of record that will partner with you to grow your business internationally? FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, gaming, and other digital goods businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

The post Enhance Customer Experience With FastSpring’s Subscription Pause Feature appeared first on FastSpring.

• How much of the payment lifecycle each platform handles (e.g. payment processing, gathering and remitting taxes, subscription management, etc.), plus any additional software you’ll need to add to your tech stack.
• Use cases, companies, and industries each solution is best for.
• A detailed comparison of key features, such as checkout and reporting.
• Basic information on pricing models for each.

TL;DR: Stripe primarily deals with payment processing, whereas FastSpring and Paddle handle payment processing, subscription management, collecting and remitting tax, fraud protection, and much more — without the need for additional software.

Table of Contents

• What areas of the payment lifecycle will you be able to manage, and what other software will you need for a complete payment solution?
• What types of businesses and which industries can use each platform?
• Functionality and feature comparisons:
  • Payment Processing
  • Calculating and remitting sales tax, VAT, and GST
  • Checkout
  • Subscription Management
  • Reporting and Analytics
• Pricing.
• Customer reviews.

Note: Information in this article was validated at time of publishing and is subject to change.

If you’ve been looking at payment services providers but want a more comprehensive merchant of record to help you grow your business internationally, we can help. FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video games, and digital products businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Interested? Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

Stripe vs. Paddle vs. FastSpring: How Comprehensive Is Each Payment Solution?

What areas of the payment lifecycle will you be able to manage with each, and will you need other software or services for a complete payment solution?

Stripe

Stripe is best known for payment processing, meaning they help you collect payment details and get payments authorized. Stripe enables you to accept payments online (or in-person with the Stripe Terminal) for any type of product. 

Stripe also offers a few basic features for subscription management, fraud detection, and invoicing, among other features. That said, you’ll need additional software to manage complex recurring billing needs, accept more payment methods around the world, or create a customized checkout process.

With Stripe, you’re responsible for remitting sales tax and VAT. Plus, it’s on you to stay up to date and compliant with local laws and regulations everywhere your customers live. (More on this later.) You may even need additional headcount to manage these aspects yourself.

FastSpring

Unlike Stripe, FastSpring offers a complete payment solution, ready “out of the box.” With FastSpring, you can outsource your entire checkout process from end to end — and we take on the liability for sales tax and VAT remittance, fraud prevention, and tax compliance.

With FastSpring, you’ll have access to:

• Multiple payment processors (to improve authorization rates and make global transactions easier).
• Flexible subscription management and recurring billing tools.
• Done-for-you tax compliance.
• B2B digital invoicing.
• Advanced fraud detection.
• Fully customizable checkout.
• Chargeback management.
• Detailed reports and analytics.
• And much more.

We act as your merchant of record (MoR), meaning we take on transaction liability for you. We take the lead on risk management, chargebacks, and global VAT and taxes — because we’re ultimately responsible for every transaction.

You’ll be able to manage all aspects of the payment lifecycle from your FastSpring dashboard — without adding extra software or headcount.

Paddle

Paddle offers solutions for payment processing, subscription management, and fraud detection, and is more feature-rich than Stripe’s solutions. Like FastSpring, Paddle is an MoR.

Related: SaaS Billing Software: 7 Tools in 3 Categories & How to Choose

Stripe vs. Paddle vs. FastSpring: Who Is Each Platform Best For?

Stripe: Nearly Any Business

Stripe can be used by nearly any type of business in nearly any industry, including both ecommerce and in-person sales.

While smaller companies and startups may get by with Stripe for a while, growing SaaS companies are likely to run into a few struggles while using Stripe, particularly around sales tax and VAT.

In the past, SaaS companies didn’t have to remit sales tax or VAT, but that changed when the European Union (EU) began requiring software sellers to collect and remit VAT based on the buyer’s location and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states can charge sales tax on purchases from out-of-state sellers.

Now SaaS companies have to keep track of — and adhere to — constantly changing tax laws in every locality where you have customers. That’s why SaaS and digital products companies are better off choosing an MoR (such as FastSpring) that will handle sales tax and VAT collection, remittance, and general compliance for you.

FastSpring: B2C and B2B SaaS and Digital Goods Companies

For 20 years, FastSpring has been serving both B2C and B2B companies selling software and digital products. We’ve been here throughout the growth of the subscription business and have an in-depth understanding of the unique complexities of subscription selling and billing.

• Mailbird achieved over 100% growth by switching from Stripe to FastSpring. The flexibility of the platform and the ability to stay compliant with tax laws, were the main reasons Mailbird chose FastSpring. Read the Mailbird case study here.
• Capture One increased their conversion rate by 40% by switching from an in-house solution to FastSpring to help them with global payments. FastSpring offers localized checkout experiences that automatically display accurate pricing, language, currency, and taxes around the world. Plus, it was clear FastSpring is a partner in growth, ready to help migrate from another payment processing platform, optimize checkout flows, or help expand into new global marketplaces. Read the Capture One case study here.
• SocialBee doubled their monthly recurring revenue and managed tax compliance by switching from Braintree to FastSpring. Once the SocialBee team realized they needed more than a payment processor, partnering with FastSpring was an easy choice. Read the SocialBee case study here.

Paddle: SaaS Companies

Paddle has been serving SaaS companies for about ten years. While Paddle’s platform was historically better suited for B2C companies, they’ve added more features for B2B companies such as automated invoicing.

Stripe vs. Paddle vs. FastSpring: Key Features

Payment Processing (Payment Methods, Currencies, and More)

Stripe

To start processing payments with Stripe, you have to configure each location with the currency and payment methods you want to offer in that location. Once set up, Stripe will automatically convert product prices and display the correct currency and payment options at checkout.

Stripe supports 135+ currencies. 

You’ll be able to accept payments from major credit card networks (including MasterCard and Visa), bank transfers, vouchers, and popular wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Stripe also supports in-person transactions via the Stripe Terminal and mobile SDKs.

FastSpring

FastSpring makes it simple for SaaS and ecommerce companies to accept payments in most currencies and preferred payment methods around the world. Instead of configuring each one individually, FastSpring sellers can simply turn on localized payments and start accepting global payments right away.

While Stripe automatically converts prices to the local currency for you, FastSpring provides more flexibility:

• You can let FastSpring make the conversions for you, or you can set a fixed price for each of your products in each currency.
• You can let FastSpring choose the appropriate currency based on the user’s location, choose a specific currency for each location, or let the customer choose their preferred currency. FastSpring supports 23+ currencies.

With FastSpring, customers can make payments using: 

• Credit cards including Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, JCB, WeChat Pay, Kakao Pay, and UnionPay.
• ACH.
• SEPA Direct Debit.
• Wire transfers.
• Wallets including PayPal, Apple Pay, Amazon, Alipay, and more.

FastSpring also connects to multiple international payment gateways, improving the likelihood of authorization.

Payments have a higher success rate when the payment gateway is in the same location as the buyer. FastSpring automatically uses intelligent payment routing to route online payments through the gateway with the highest authorization rates for that payment method and location. 

Plus, using multiple payment gateways solves most failed payment issues that are due to network errors. If a payment gateway is experiencing a technical failure, FastSpring automatically retries the payment using a different gateway — without your team having to lift a finger. 

Bonus: FastSpring Partners with Sift

FastSpring takes the lead on fraud and risk activities (including chargebacks). We partner with Sift, a global leader in risk analysis and fraud prevention, to keep your transaction secure. Sift uses machine learning and AI to:

• Increase accuracy in fraud decisions.
• Improve approval rates and result in fewer false positives.
• Stop bad actors before a transaction is even processed.

FastSpring also blocks transactions from countries and jurisdictions where companies are currently not allowed to do business.

Paddle

Paddle also utilizes multiple payment gateways and lets companies accept global payments with minimal setup. 

Paddle supports 30+ currencies, popular credit cards (including MasterCard, Union Pay, and more), wire transfers, and wallets (including Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, and Alipay) — although some of these options are still in beta testing. Paddle does not accept checks or Pix.

Calculating and Remitting Sales Tax, VAT, and GST

Stripe

Stripe Tax can help you calculate sales tax, VAT, and GST. While Stripe can help handle U.S. tax registrations, they only provide instructions for enabling tax features and assigning tax codes in other localities. You are responsible for the decisions and implications of using those features (e.g., knowing how your product is classified under tax law and if/where you have nexus, need to register, collect, file, and submit consumption tax).

If you have questions about how to optimize tax rates, qualify for reduced tax rates, or any other tax-related question, you’ll likely be told to consult your tax advisor or read through the help articles. 

If you accidentally set it up incorrectly and collect the wrong amount (or type) of tax, you’ll be held liable. 

Plus, remitting sales taxes is often more involved than filling out a simple spreadsheet and writing a check. More and more countries are mandating additional requirements to stay compliant. For example: 

• Countries such as Colombia, Japan, Mexico, Serbia, and others require local representation, meaning you have to hire someone with a physical presence in that country to be responsible for your tax liability. This can cost anywhere from US$5k to US$15k per year.
• Countries such as India, Indonesia, Japan, and others require your account to be “pre-funded” meaning you have to predict the amount of tax you will owe and keep that money in your account until it’s time to file (up to three months in advance).
• Countries such as Serbia, United Kingdom, Taiwan, and others require electronic invoicing (it applies to non-resident companies, as well). An average sized company will pay around US$10k annual for these services.  Note: E-invoicing mandates are increasing at an alarming rate — with the EU rolling out universal electronic invoicing requirements by 2028.
• Countries such as Taiwan, Indonesia, Nigeria, Vietnam, and others require you to file corporate income tax in addition to VAT, regardless if you have a physical presence or permanent establishment. (This can increase a country’s compliance burden from 5%-20% based on local tax rates).  

Finally, wiring international tax payments isn’t easy or free. The corresponding and receiving banks both charge fees, and there’s the additional risk involved with foreign transactions.

So, while Stripe has taken important steps toward helping you collect sales tax, they’re a long way from providing an end-to-end solution for sales tax and international tax.

FastSpring

FastSpring handles the entire process of gathering and remitting sales tax, VAT, and GST for you.

With 20 years of experience filing 1,200+ tax returns each year, our team ensures the correct amount of sales tax and VAT is being collected at checkout — we even handle tax-exempt transactions in the U.S. and B2B reverse charges when allowed internationally. 

FastSpring files and collects taxes in over 55 countries, 13 provinces, and all 45 U.S. states that collect sales tax (five states don’t collect any sales tax). 

Then, our team remits those taxes for you and ensures all the necessary procedures are in place to stay compliant. If a country or state approaches you about tax compliance, our team will advise you on how to respond — even as far as providing copy-and-paste responses.

We build and maintain relationships with tax law specialists across the world to make sure we are aware of laws and regulations as they change.

Bonus: Custom Tax Codes

Tools like TaxJar, Avalara, and other tax software provide you with tax codes for most products and services. If you want to offer a product or service that doesn’t fit neatly into those codes (e.g., an in-person conference with some virtual attendees and speakers), you’ll be on your own to calculate and collect the right tax rate. 

This isn’t an issue for FastSpring sellers: we build unique product tax codes customized by use case — within minutes. Just tell us about your product or service, and we’ll create the tax code for you.

Paddle

Like FastSpring, Paddle takes the lead on gathering and remitting sales tax, VAT, and GST for you. Unlike FastSpring, Paddle doesn’t support tax exempt cases in the U.S.

Checkout

Stripe

Stripe Checkout is a prebuilt payment page designed for use on any device. You have a few options for customization (e.g., font, block shapes, colors, etc.) but it’s pretty limited. Stripe automatically translates Checkout to the appropriate language (35+ options) and currency (135+) based on the buyer’s location.

FastSpring

FastSpring lets you customize your checkout, from custom fields to custom colors using our branding tools and CSS overrides. You also have the flexibility to choose whether you want to give your developer complete control over checkout or let FastSpring manage it for you (or somewhere in between). 

Here’s an overview of FastSpring’s checkout options: 

• Three versions: You have the option to embed checkout directly on your webpage, use a popup checkout, or redirect your customers to a Web Storefront managed by FastSpring.

• Store Builder Library (SBL): FastSpring’s JavaScript library lets you customize, brand, and streamline your entire checkout flow to build trust and eliminate friction throughout the buyer’s journey.
• Localized Checkout: Let customers choose their preferred language or let FastSpring choose the appropriate language based on the buyer’s location. FastSpring supports 21+ languages and 23+ currencies to help expand your global reach.
• Built-in tracking and testing tools: With FastSpring’s built-in tracking tools, you can easily identify ways to improve conversion rates.
• Personalized customer support: Our team is always available to help you build the best checkout experience for your business. Some companies only provide personalized support to their largest clients. At FastSpring, we don’t play favorites — our team is always happy to help in any way they can.

Paddle

Paddle provides two versions of checkout: 

• Pop-up overlay.
• Inline embedded on your webpage.

Customization is pretty limited with the overlay checkout option, but the inline version allows you more control of the look and feel. Paddle supports 17 languages and automatically translates your checkout.

Subscription Management

Stripe

Stripe Billing includes a few different subscription options: 

• Flat-rate billing (for a monthly or annual price).
• Multiple price billing (where a single product is sold for different prices in different locations).
• Per seat billing (based on active users during the billing cycle).
• Usage-based billing (single unit or tiered).
• Flat-rate + overage (a combination of flat-rate and usage-based billing).

These options work for some companies that only have a few simple subscription-based products, but companies with more complex recurring billing needs (read: SaaS) often need an additional tool, meaning you’ll have to manage and pay for both separately.

Finally, Stripe offers a customer portal where customers can manage their accounts (both FastSpring and Paddle offer this as well). 

Related: 8 Best Chargebee Alternatives and Competitors (And How They’re Different)

FastSpring

FastSpring provides a wide variety of subscription management options built specifically for SaaS and other digital product companies. 

Plus, most of these options can be set up without writing any code. For example, you can set up: 

• Automatic weekly, monthly, yearly, or custom recurring billing.
• Prorated billing to accommodate upgrades — and downgrades — mid cycle.
• Free or paid trials of any length.
• Trials with or without collecting payment details.
• Automatic or manual renewal.
• Upsells, cross-sells, one-time add-ons, and discounts.
• Automatic failure handling, notifications, and retries to reduce churn.
• B2B digital invoicing
• And much more.

 You’ll also have access to our API and webhooks library for more customization options. 

Don’t forget: If you don’t use an MoR like FastSpring, you’ll still need to worry about your recurring billing model following local transaction laws and regulations. 

For example, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) limits most automatic recurring payments to ₹15,000 (approximately US$180). If a payment is over that amount, the customer must approve each transaction manually. You also have to file an official mandate with the RBI that outlines the procedures you have in place to ensure compliance — or face heavy fines or be prevented from selling to customers in India.

While some subscription management tools will release community updates whenever they learn about new regulations, you’re the one held responsible for keeping track of and adhering to all laws and regulations.

FastSpring customers don’t have to worry about this because we take on transaction liability for you. 

Our team of legal experts stays up to date on all relevant legalities, ensures the necessary procedures are in place, takes the lead on audits, and offers individual guidance on how to stay compliant — all at no additional cost. 

Related: International Recurring Payments (How We Handle It for You)

Paddle

Using a series of webhooks and their API, Paddle claims to support “any billing model.” 

Paddle supports free or paid trials; however, it looks like customers will be required to provide payment details in order to start the trial. Paddle also automatically applies prorated amounts when customers change their plan mid-cycle (e.g., add new users or upgrade). 

Related: An In-Depth Guide to Subscription Billing Platforms (+ 5 Options)

Reporting and Analytics

Stripe

Stripe offers a suite of revenue recognition tools to help you streamline accounting, including: 

• Standard accounting reports, such as balance sheets and income statements.
• Configurable revenue rules, such as excluding passthrough fees and auto-adjusting recognition schedules.
• Revenue overview reports.
• Query your Stripe data using SQL.

All reports can be viewed in your Stripe dashboard, and some reports can be downloaded as a CSV file. You can also integrate with popular accounting tools such as QuickBooks Desktop and Xero. However, the ability to import data from other revenue recognition providers into Stripe is still in beta. 

FastSpring

FastSpring Reporting and Analytics is a robust suite that helps you understand: 

• How each product contributes to your bottom line. 
• When customers are most likely to drop off.
• What coupons or promotions are working.
• Which subscription models generate the most revenue.
• Where your customers are located.
• What currencies and payment methods customers prefer.
• Chargeback rates by customer segment.
• Chargeback rates by product line.
• The status of your active webhooks.
• And much more.

Most of this information can be found in one of FastSpring’s several dashboards, including: 

• Revenue Overview.
• Subscription Overview. 
• Revenue Recognition (Beta).
• Chargeback Overview.
• Webhook Status.

For example, the revenue overview dashboard contains more general information, such as total transactions by country or net sales by product. 

For another example, the subscription overview dashboard lets you drill down into more specific details, such as active customers or monthly recurring revenue (MRR) over time. 

If you don’t see the exact report you need in the dashboards, you can create and save custom reports. Or, you can reach out to our team and we’ll help you find (or build) the report you need. Any report can be viewed in your dashboard or downloaded as a CSV, PNG, or XLSX file. 

Paddle

Paddle acquired ProfitWell to provide reporting and analytics features. A few of the things you can do with ProfitWell Metrics include:

• Automatically track and report on key performance indicators, such as MRR.
• Monitor user engagement and churn.
• Use benchmarking and segmentation tools.

Stripe vs. Paddle vs. FastSpring: Pricing Models

Stripe

For Stripe, pricing works loosely on an a la carte model. Payment processing is priced based on transactions, with the exact transaction fee varying based on payment method (e.g., credit card, digital wallet, Buy Now Pay Later, ACH, etc.).

By using Stripe payment processing, you’ll gain access to a number of features, such as checkout and payment links. Other key features, such as recurring billing, invoicing, instant payouts, and tax features incur additional fees.

With Stripe, you may also need to pay for additional software and headcount to manage other aspects of the billing lifecycle such as advanced fraud detection, subscription management, remitting sales tax and VAT, and more.

To learn more about Stripe pricing, check out their pricing page.

FastSpring

With FastSpring, you’ll have access to the entire platform (and all services) for one flat-rate fee. Since we take on transaction liability for you and take the lead on sales tax and VAT, you won’t need any additional software or headcount. 

Our team works with you to find an affordable price based on the volume of transactions you move through FastSpring. Plus, you’ll only be charged when successful transactions take place.

Reach out to our team to find the rate that works for you. You can also preview FastSpring features by setting up a free account. 

Paddle

Paddle advertises a flat-rate fee of 5% + 50¢ per transaction for their core product, which includes most of the features you’ll need — payments processing, checkout, subscriptions, global tax and compliance, fraud protection, reporting, and more — but it doesn’t include everything. 

Invoicing, for example, is an extra charge.

To learn more about Paddle pricing, visit their website.

Customer Reviews

Stripe

Stripe currently has 4.4 stars on G2 (a popular software review site) with 125+ reviews.

FastSpring

FastSpring currently has 4.5 stars on G2 with 185+ reviews.

Here’s what some of our customers had to say:

Paddle

Paddle currently has 4.5 stars on G2 with 171+ reviews.

Conclusion: FastSpring vs. Paddle vs. Stripe

If you’re selling physical products or services, FastSpring and Paddle are not an option, making Stripe the best choice out of the three options discussed here. If you are selling digital products, Stripe may not be the best choice because you’ll be on your own to build out a complete payment solution (which is costly and time-consuming). 

FastSpring has been serving SaaS businesses for twenty years and is well prepared to support B2C and B2B business needs.

If you’re looking for a payments solution that also handles taxes — so you can focus on building great products — FastSpring can help. Our all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video games, and digital products businesses includes VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Interested? Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

This post was originally published in January 2023 and has been updated.

The post A Detailed Comparison of Stripe vs. Paddle vs. FastSpring appeared first on FastSpring.

Here are the questions we sought to answer by analyzing anonymized subscription data for transactions across various Asian countries (excluding broader “APAC” regions like Australia, New Zealand, and Indonesia):

• How do customers in Asia’s growing markets  prefer to manage their SaaS subscriptions? 
• Are their preferences similar to those in the U.S. or EU, or are they different? 
• Do regional nuances, such as the choice between annual and monthly plans, significantly impact renewal rates? 
• How can businesses best position their subscription products for success in the Asian market?

Drawing on anonymized global subscription data, we compared monthly and annual subscription renewal rates between Asia, the United States, and the European Union for products across multiple SaaS verticals.

Here’s what we uncovered:

Key Insights Into How Asia-Region Customers Renew SaaS Subscriptions

1. Monthly subscription renewals are lower in Asia than in the EU and the U.S., but they’re growing.

When it comes to monthly SaaS subscriptions — i.e., those that renew each month with the option to cancel at any time — both the EU and the U.S. report similar average renewal rates in the upper 80th percentile. The EU monthly renewal rates averaged 85% over the last 12 months, while the U.S. averaged 89%. This means that, for example, for every 100 U.S. customers in June, about 89 will renew their subscription for July.

However, in Asia, retention for monthly subscriptions is notably lower at 75%. If you’re selling software at the same price into both the U.S. and Asia, this subscription rate difference represents a 16% lower lifetime value (LTV) for Asia-area customers.

That said, there’s a silver lining: While monthly retention in the EU and North America remained stable from 2023 to 2024, Asia’s monthly retention rate improved by approximately 3%, showing positive momentum.

2. Annual subscriptions in Asia match or exceed renewal rates in other regions.

Annual SaaS subscriptions — i.e., those that renew once per year — paint a different picture.  In the EU, customers renewed annual subscriptions at a rate of 55%, compared with 56% in Asia and 59% in the U.S. 

Here we see Asia-area customers renewing annual subscription rates at much closer rates to global averages.

Conclusions

What we can conclude from this data is that customers in Asia are less likely to renew monthly subscriptions than customers in other global markets, but are just as likely to renew annual subscriptions.

This provides some crucial insights for SaaS companies selling into Asian markets — particularly when those companies use U.S. and EU customer data to set “one-size-fits-all” global pricing. Those pricing models may not hold up globally given the different regional customer trends.

Specifically, if you have set your monthly subscription pricing for all markets based on EU and U.S. customer trends, you may be disappointed by the financial performance of monthly subscriptions in Asia, given the likely 15% drop in LTV for that region. 

A better bet is to promote annual subscriptions in Asia, where customer behavior better matches other global markets.  With very similar renewal rates, your pricing model will more likely deliver the LTV, profitability, and subsequent growth that your business is expecting.

Strategy: Focus on Annual Subscriptions to Build a Strong APAC Subscriber Base

Prioritizing annual subscription models could prove to be the key to success for businesses looking to expand into Asia. Here are seven strategies to grow your annual subscription base in Asia.

7 Strategies for Growing Annual Subscriptions in Asia

1. Emphasize Annual Plans in Your Marketing

Given the stronger retention rates for annual subscriptions in Asia, make them a core focus in your marketing efforts. Offer exclusive incentives, such as discounts or bonuses, to encourage customers to commit to a yearly plan and maximize long-term retention.

2. Tailor Pricing to Favor Annual Subscriptions

Competitive pricing is crucial. Design pricing strategies that make annual plans more attractive than monthly ones, offering a noticeable discount for committing to a full year. This approach taps into Asia’s apparent preference for long-term subscriptions.

3. Leverage Popular Local Payment Methods

Simplifying the payment process is essential, especially for annual plans. Offering widely-used local payment options — such as AliPay or WeChat Pay — helps reduce friction at checkout and boosts customer satisfaction, leading to higher renewal rates.

4. Invest in Customer Support to Drive Retention

Retaining annual subscribers requires ongoing support. Ensure that your customer service is not only easily accessible but also localized to the region, with support offered in local languages. This can help address any issues or concerns over the subscription period and build trust, fostering long-term retention.

5. Reward Loyalty With Renewal Incentives

Consider implementing loyalty programs that reward customers for renewing their subscriptions. This is particularly effective for annual plans, where the stakes are higher and a single renewal carries more weight.

6. Monitor Regional Retention Trends

While the insights shared here are valuable, it’s important to regularly review your own subscription data across different regions. Each region is not a monolith, so trends can also vary from country to country, and even the type of business or software you offer may affect how receptive each area is to subscriptions. Staying on top of retention trends across Asia compared to North America and the EU will allow you to adjust your strategy and better meet the evolving needs of each market.

7. Localize the Customer Experience

Localization extends beyond just offering your checkout in many languages and currencies. Tailor your product features, pricing, and customer support to reflect regional preferences. By aligning your subscription offerings with the cultural and business nuances of each market in Asia, you can significantly boost long-term retention.

Let FastSpring Help You Take Your SaaS to Asia

FastSpring is the leading full-stack merchant of record service for growth-stage SaaS and software businesses. If you’re looking for a merchant of record to help your business expand globally, we’re here to help.

And with the opening of FastSpring’s office in Singapore in January 2024, this strategic expansion marks a significant milestone in our journey to strengthen our global footprint and better serve our clients in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region.

✦ Meet FastSpring Senior Account Executive Jay Jia and benefit from his expertise about growing a digital goods business in Asia in this deep diving podcast interview. ✦

Our platform serves as an all-in-one payment platform that handles everything from payment and checkout localization, to sales and VAT tax management, to customer support for end consumers, and so much more.

Learn more about how FastSpring can help you grow your business globally: Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

The post Breaking Into Asia? Benchmarking Data and Insights on SaaS Subscriptions in Asia appeared first on FastSpring.

As the VP and General Manager of the Stardock Software division, Brad led his team through this process and has learned some valuable lessons about doing it as strategically and easily as possible. 

FastSpring is proud to have been a big part of supporting that process for Stardock, and Brad had some great things to say about how easy we made it for them. We asked him to share his process tips for anyone who might be considering or actively planning the same transition themselves.

Here are Brad’s top recommendations: 

• Have a committed partner like FastSpring to handle the subscription infrastructure so you don’t have to, including:
  • Choosing a partner that’s making the same investments in subscription management that you are.
  • Letting FastSpring handle the subscription infrastructure.
  • Integrating customer-facing subscription management tools on your own site.
• Start small with an incremental approach.
• Communicate frequently and clearly with customers about the transition.
• Prepare for renewals with value adds to reduce churn.
• Design the transition plan that’s right for your company.

Are you looking for a merchant of record that will partner with you to grow your SaaS business? FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video game, and other digital goods businesses, including subscription management, payment localization, VAT and sales tax management, consumer support, and more. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

5 Tips for Making the SaaS Transition Easier

1. Choose FastSpring for Subscription Infrastructure and Long-Term Partnership

Stardock Software first started using FastSpring in 2018 to help them sell their software products, and they’d always had a relatively good experience with how FastSpring handles sales of one-time software purchases. 

Luckily, FastSpring was able to make the transition to subscriptions very positive, too — about as simple as replacing a few SKUs on their site (more on that below).

This was a relief, since the technology behind subscription management for software purchases can get very complex very quickly, with many scenarios that need to be accounted for and multiple technological components that need to be covered. 

“Most people would not think about all the intricacies that have to happen” when switching from a single transaction to a subscription, Brad explains. “As an example, you have a product that was previously purchased once, and it worked forever. Now you suddenly purchase a product, and it has a time box on it that is tied to a subscription — which means that product now has to stop working if a user stops paying for it. So that gets complex. And then, what do you do if they’re offline? What do you do in all these different scenarios? There’s a real dividing line here, which is where FastSpring came in.” 

When Brad and his team started planning to test the SaaS business model in spring of 2023, knowing that FastSpring already had the infrastructure to support subscription sales meant that Stardock Software didn’t need to build their own, search for a specialty tool or service, or worry about that part at all, really. 

“The worst thing that can happen is, you make the switch to subscription, and then your technology fails to make the switch effectively. And we were only able to do this because we had confidence that FastSpring’s subscription model would support our endeavors.”

“We were only able to do this because we had confidence that FastSpring’s subscription model would support our endeavors.”

FastSpring is proud to have been a key part of Stardock’s business ecosystem as they tackled an initiative that’s driving major growth for their business. 

Choose a Partner Making the Same Investments In Subscription Management

Brad admits that Stardock will always be in a position that keeps them from being “married to any single vendor,” and they know FastSpring isn’t the only merchant of record or subscription management tool on the market. 

“But at the same time,” he explains, “we knew that with moving to a subscription model, we had to bet on a partner who was making the same level of investments that we were making. And the conclusion was that FastSpring was on that path of continued investment and wasn’t just collecting the paycheck every month and doing nothing.” 

“We had to bet on a partner who was making the same level of investments that we were making.”

Brad was able to see where FastSpring was making those investments, as product updates rolled out and as future timelines and roadmaps were shared with Stardock by their Customer Success Manager, Danica. He says that helps, because “it’s like, ‘Okay, if we’re going to go subscription (which again, ratchets up the stickiness factor for FastSpring), then we’ve got to make sure FastSpring is going to be here for the long run, too.’” 

Brad went on to describe Stardock’s relationship with FastSpring as “symbiotic.” “Because the better we do, the better FastSpring is going to do. We’ve got to make sure that everybody’s winning, and things with FastSpring just felt aligned.”

Let FastSpring Handle the Subscription Infrastructure

“You have two technical components to this,” Brad clarifies. “You have the subscription side (the actual financial transaction that must occur), and the mechanism that keeps that information updated. And then you also have the actual app itself. So this is where we really started getting deep into FastSpring, because FastSpring already had the subscription components.” 

Because Stardock and FastSpring were growing together through this subscription technology journey, Brad saw FastSpring’s earlier iterations of the subscription management tools. That was already enough to make switching on subscriptions a much simpler process than it would have been without FastSpring. 

“At the time, it was a little more bare bones, but it had the infrastructure in place to actually allow us to do this. Because at the end of the day, you can’t just turn on a subscription — the whole plumbing pipeline has to be there,” he reiterates. “And so we connected with FastSpring, explained our scenario, they helped us with the documentation and helped us work through some edge cases, and then we were able to wire it up through already deployed FastSpring infrastructure on our end.” 

This turned out to be about as simple as setting up a new product SKU on their site that was marked as a subscription, outlining the attributes of the subscription (in their case, annual as opposed to monthly), and setting the price on the product. “There are a few other options in there,” Brad says, “like, ‘How do you want to communicate to the customer that things are about to renew?,’” but it was overall a simple process.

“Nothing in life at this magnitude is painless, but it was able to be done relatively quickly to pivot our business from a modeling perspective,” he assures us. “And that was the biggest value unlock: that we didn’t have to go through and reinvent the wheel on subscriptions for our flexible storefront at the end of the day.”

“That was the biggest value unlock: that we didn’t have to go through and reinvent the wheel on subscriptions for our flexible storefront at the end of the day.”

FastSpring’s subscription management features include:

• Trial management (with or without payment method, and free or paid trials).
• Recurring payment processing.
• Plan management tools for businesses or their customers to manage the details of their subscriptions.
• A subscription overview dashboard with insightful metrics.
• Correspondence automation.
• Churn reduction and dunning management (automatic retrying of failed renewal payments and related email communications). 

All of this was in addition to the standard features and tools FastSpring already provides, including:

• Global payments for easily transacting across borders.
• Tax compliance, include calculation, collection, and remittance of VAT and sales taxes.
• Customizable checkouts that are localized to customers and branded with your company branding, plus they’re available as embedded, popup, or a hosted FastSpring web storefront to accommodate your business needs.
• Fraud prevention with intelligent alerts and fewer chargebacks.
• Reporting and analytics, including subscription, revenue, and chargeback dashboards to help you track recurring revenue from your new subs.
• Developer tools like a JavaScript library; FastSpring’s REST API; webhooks; and integrations and connections with third-party systems including marketing analytics tools, CRMs, DRMs, BI tools, and more.
• And much more.

Are you looking for a merchant of record that will partner with you to grow your SaaS business? FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video game, and other digital goods businesses, including subscription management, payment localization, VAT and sales tax management, consumer support, and more. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

Integrate Customer-Facing Subscription Management on Your Own Site

Besides handling subscription sales and management on the back end, FastSpring also provides account management tools for Stardock’s customers to manage their own subscriptions on the front end. 

Brad recommends taking advantage of an embedded subscription management portal to provide a totally seamless experience to your users. 

FastSpring’s Embedded Payment Management Components are an embedded same-page subscription payment management experience (including adding, updating, and deleting payment methods) that enables your customers to manage their subscription payment methods without leaving your account management portal. 

You can create, customize (and brand), embed, and test the payment management component on your own site to give your customers the best experience possible while managing payments for their new subscriptions. 

FastSpring can act as an end-to-end subscription solution via our subscription API, ranging from getting subscription data, updating account information, and showing proration previews of estimated proposed plan changes to customers — all within your portal.

2. Start Small With an Incremental Approach

FastSpring having the subscription management technology handled meant that — besides being able to focus on software development instead of on the tech needed to sell their software — Brad and his team were able to focus on other nuanced facets of making the switch beyond the technical specs, such as which products they wanted to switch over to the subscription model first.

He recommends that you start small and cascade any learnings to additional products as you add to your subscription offerings. 

“Our model was ‘Start small, risk small,’ and then ‘Move big, risk big.’ And by that time, it was no longer ‘Risk big,’ it was ‘Manage big.’”

“Our model was ‘Start small, risk small,’ and then ‘Move big, risk big.’ And by that time, it was no longer ‘Risk big,’ it was ‘Manage big.’”

While Stardock had multiple products with multiple support add-ons already, Brad outlined that they started the subscription experiment with one support add-on for one product, and for one specific subtype of their customer base. “What we started with was actually support and maintenance of a specific product. As an example, we sell Fences®. Fences® sells a lot to enterprise customers. Where we started trialing it was, Fences® the product remained a single point of transaction, but we introduced an option that would allow you to purchase annualized subscription maintenance and support for a reduced cost.” 

Essentially, you can apply a few filters to your products, add-ons, and user types to get a relatively small experimental group. “We just started on one particular product that we knew sold in volume with one particular scenario, which was only business, and then one particular type of customer who’s like, ‘I’ll take the discount for the renewal.’”

Once you start to see those first subscriptions begin to flow in, you can gauge whether it’s flowing as expected and make adjustments as needed, Brad says. “You compare and contrast, like, ‘How many people are choosing the subscription?’ And then you just amplify things up. You go to another product, and go to another product. And then you try a primary product. And then you try the big suite,” which for Stardock is Object Desktop™, containing all of their apps. “That was the big switchover once we had confidence.”

Starting small helped Stardock avoid any large upfront risks as they began testing the benefits of SaaS. 

3. Communicate Frequently and Clearly With Customers

Communicating business model and/or delivery model changes to your customers can be a real struggle, and they can greatly affect the user’s experience and relationship with your company and your product. Brad recommends you put a lot of strategy and care into how and when you announce upcoming changes.

“It distills down into reducing risk, not from a technology perspective, but from a communication issues perspective. There’s no way to mitigate all possible communication issues, and marketing is always the last thing you put out,” he says. 

“It distills down into reducing risk, not from a technology perspective, but from a communication issues perspective.”

“There are a lot of challenges from the perspective of marketing, communication, educating the end user, unlocking value, and creating expectations that what you’re doing is better for everybody involved,” Brad outlined. “Because it’s really easy for people to hear ‘subscriptions’ and think, ‘Oh, the business just wants to suck more money out of us.’ And that’s not the path we tried to take, but that’s always the narrative that’s going to be pushed, from a client perspective, onto you.” 

Brad further explains that “Anytime you move anybody’s cheese, they get really upset. People will say, ‘I’ve been a customer for 20 years, and suddenly you’re changing your business model! Why are you doing that? Is it because you hate money?,’” he quotes, implying that customers may threaten to stop using the product.

He says challenges like those are evergreen and will continue to come up, so being proactive about communicating changes is key to working through the change with your customers, especially long-term ones. 

Stardock’s “Start small, risk small; move big, manage big” rollout model really applied to customer communications. 

“If you try to go out the gate with a really high value, then the marketing messaging must really be on point to the dollar value you’re trying to charge for your SaaS service or product.”

But since Stardock had started their SaaS transition with a small subset of products, they were able to test communications and evaluate customer feedback in a very manageable pipeline before transitioning to their larger core products. “Because once you put your core product out there in that model, the amount of inbound communications you get is a lot,” Brad tells us. “And to try to manage that, we needed to be prepared.”

Those inbounds from customers can come from anywhere, he says. “From every possible direction — you get it from your forums, you get it through email, you get it through social media, you get it through phone calls, you get it everywhere, because people are trying to figure out what you’re doing. And you learn real quick — and I mean real quick — where your communication wasn’t clear or effective.” 

But thanks to the small-to-big transition plan, those learnings get applied to the next larger product you roll out on subscription, and the communication bumps you may experience at first are only with a relatively small subset of customers. For the next round, now you know where, when, and how additional communications need to be posted. 

4. Prepare for Renewals With Value-Adds to Help Reduce Churn

Because Stardock opted to offer their subscription software on an annual pricing model instead of monthly — and because they launched subscriptions a little under a year ago, not just to new customers but also to all existing customers at the same time — Stardock’s first big renewal period is yet to happen. But it’s quickly approaching.

“For us, the big question for 2024 can be summed up in a single word: churn,” Brad explains. “We have expectations and some modeling that suggest where things should land. But this will be the year for us to determine how we approach subscriptions going for year two and effectively beyond.”

Despite the possibility for churn, he says they feel they’ve added a lot of value to their SaaS products. Besides having FastSpring’s retention-supporting features such as churn reducing dunning management as part of their tech stack, Stardock is releasing new apps and services for their subscription products to add to the real and perceived value of their products to customers. “We’ve tried to increase the value from our perspective, and we’re going to learn real quick whether or not we’ve increased the value from the user perspective.”

5. Design the Transition Plan That’s Right for Your Company

Back when Stardock had begun planning a SaaS transition for their products, Brad says they heard a few different things within the industry about the absolutely best way to do it. One particularly common piece of advice was to “go cold turkey” and launch everything as SaaS all at once. 

“The best way I can describe my job is trying to decide what advice is bad advice,” he told us. “And I would say that was bad advice.” 

That hard-won sense of discernment is how Brad and Stardock landed on the small-to-big rollout plan, which really worked well for them.

But he recommends that any software company evaluating if and how to make the switch to SaaS should decide what’s best for their own company, without just listening to the loudest chatter in the industry. 

“Every company is unique in what their clientele will expect and/or tolerate.”

“There was no company that we talked to who had gone through similar things, that had the same experience as us, and nobody after us will, either,” Brad assures us. “Every company is unique in what their clientele will expect and/or tolerate.”

Partner With FastSpring

Ready to explore how your SaaS or software business can benefit from FastSpring’s continued commitment to subscription management product development?

FastSpring is a merchant of record that provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video game, and other digital products businesses, including subscription management, global payments, fraud prevention, VAT and sales tax management, consumer support, and so much more. 

Set up a demo or sign up to check out the platform yourself.

Related Reading

• Visit our Subscription Management product page for more info and links to our documentation.
• Read more about how FastSpring helps SaaS businesses move subscriptions on our SaaS solutions page.
• Hear from many more satisfied FastSpring customers on our Case Study page. 
• Check out our Dashboards documentation page for detailed info on our subscription, revenue, and chargeback dashboards. 
• Wondering about how SaaS renewals might go? Read SaaS Churn: Myths, Benchmarks, and Strategies to Retain More Revenue for benchmarking data and five tips for reducing SaaS churn.
• Still not sure you fully understand dunning management? Read more about what our dunning management features do to help reduce failed payments and involuntary churn.
• Wanting to sell subscriptions with a sales team? Check out FastSpring’s Digital Invoicing and Interactive Quotes. 
• Running a startup that’s focused on getting a great valuation? Listen to our podcast episode on What Brands Look for When Considering Acquiring Software Companies.

The post Navigating Your Transition to SaaS Subscriptions: 5 Insights From Stardock’s Experience With FastSpring appeared first on FastSpring.

Will your existing users revolt to the change and switch to a new product? Will your subscriptions renew at a high enough rate to counteract a reduction in one-time sales? How do you even roll this out?

In this episode of Growth Stage, we interview Fred Linfjärd of Planday about his experiences switching from a one-time billing model to subscriptions. Fred shares his thoughts on:

• Why digital product companies should embrace subscriptions.
• How to justify the switch to your customer base.
• Avoiding the worst of community blowback.
• Must-do tactics for your rollout plan.

As a bonus, our host David Vogelpohl also has experience moving massively popular digital products from one-time fees to subscriptions, so this interview is full of hard-learned insights you can use to find success in your own rollout of subscriptions.

Whether you’re considering switching to subscriptions or are in the middle of switching, don’t miss this chance to learn insider tips on how to make this transition successful for your business. Listen or watch now!

Are you looking for a merchant of record that will help you grow your subscription software business? FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video game, and other digital goods businesses, including software management, VAT and sales tax management, global payments, and consumer support. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

Jump to video.  |  Jump to transcript.

Podcast Full Interview: Audio

Listen online or find it on more podcast services.

Podcast Full Interview: Video

Transcript

David Vogelpohl  

Hello everyone and welcome to the Growth Stage podcast by FastSpring, where we discuss how SaaS, software, and digital product companies grow revenue, build meaningful products, and increase the value of their businesses. I’m David Vogelpohl. I support the digital product community through my role at FastSpring, and I love to bring the best of the community to you here on the Growth Stage podcast. In today’s episode, we’re gonna be talking about a topic that means a lot to me, very interesting and challenging part

I find of digital businesses, which is successfully switching from one time fees to subscriptions. We often see this in the software universe. And joining us for that conversation today is someone much like myself, who’s been through this before, a lot of war stories to tell. I’d like to welcome to Growth Stage, Mr. Fred Linfjärd. Fred, welcome to Growth Stage.

Fred Linfjärd  

Thank you David, great to be here.

David Vogelpohl  

And it’s Linfjärd I didn’t say that right. I like practiced and practiced and I got it wrong, Fred.

Fred Linfjärd  

You’re not the only one, it’s totally… Okay, it’s perfect.

David Vogelpohl  

Us, us Vogelpohls have no idea what you’re talking about. Uh, but, uh, thanks for, thanks for coming on. I’m really glad to have you here and really interested to hear your story around this idea of successfully switching from one time to recurring. So for those listening and watching, what Fred is going to talk about is that switch from one time to recurring billing models, but he’s going to share his thoughts on why digital product companies who aren’t doing that should embrace subscriptions.

Fred Linfjärd  

Hahaha

David Vogelpohl  

How to justify the switch to your one-time customer base so people who’ve already been buying your product for one-time fees avoiding the worst of community blowback change to subscription can cause some anxiety for folks and Some of the must-do tactics for your own rollout plan So if you’re in the midst of it or you’re planning a switch, this is gonna be a good episode for you

All right, Fred, I’m going to ask you the same question I ask every guest of Growth Stage. What was the first thing you bought online?

Fred Linfjärd  

I bought, it was a long time ago and I think it was a book from Amazon. I know it’s boring, but at the time I think they kind of only sold books. Or it wasn’t like it was today at least. So I would go with that book from Amazon.

David Vogelpohl  

Do you recall what the book was?

Was it how to buy things online?

Fred Linfjärd  

I think it was some type of, it was the early 2000s I guess. I think it was some kind of book on maybe affiliate marketing or maybe it was HTML for dummies. I don’t know.

David Vogelpohl  

Well, I know a lot of HTML and affiliate OGs, so I’m now dying to know the author, but maybe I’ll save that question for your next time on Growth Stage. But a book on Amazon, that’s pretty on the nose. I like that. Okay, and then you’re with a company called Planday. Can you tell us a little bit about what Planday does and what you do there?

Fred Linfjärd  

Sure, yeah. So Planday is, I think the category is called workforce management platform. So B2B SaaS solve needs when it comes to scheduling and time and attendance. So for shift workers serving industries like hospitality, restaurants, hotels, and all these things, and I’m the director of growth there. So yeah, I pretty much try to make sure.

everything from acquisition to monetization plays together well and we drive profitable growth.

David Vogelpohl  

Awesome, well that’s good to hear. And the topic we’re talking about today, the switch from one time to recurring subscriptions, a lot of your war stories are rooted in one particular company switched to that. What company was that? And from the high level, could you tell us about kind of what was happening at that time?

Fred Linfjärd  

Sure, yeah. So I worked at a company called Capture One a few years back and it’s a photo editing software, desktop software. And the biggest competitor is Adobe Lightroom and Capture One is really a software and the company was born out of a camera manufacturing business called Phase One

Fred Linfjärd  

and build that out, that software business.

David Vogelpohl  

And so it was image software effectively.

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, raw converter. So a raw converter software to really get the big pictures in and you need a lot of power and that software became really, really good because it had to be good to power the phase one cameras. And then they wanted to kind of monetize that and open it up for other camera brands and make its own business out of it.

David Vogelpohl  

So you mentioned Adobe Lightroom is the biggest competitor. The switch from one time to subscription for Capture One, was this around the same time that Adobe’s creative suite was coming out and they themselves were adopting a more recurring revenue model?

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, so I think so. So this was back in 2017, I think. So Capture One had sort of a kindling business on the software. We actually had a home-built ecommerce system and entitlement system, license management system. And we had some subscriptions,

it was a very, very small amount and the big business was perpetual and selling these licenses to the software.

David Vogelpohl  

I’m chuckling a little bit internally, Fred, because around that same year, I was in the middle of my own management of a switch from one-time software to recurring in the studio press business, the WordPress themes that were sold for one time that were going to a recurring model with a compact edge. And so I just imagined us both back in 2017 doing this together and not knowing each other at that time. So, you know.

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah.

David Vogelpohl  

You talked about how Capture One kind of wanted to take advantage more of subscriptions. I mentioned how Adobe had made the shift from one time to subscription in the way they went to market. But I mean, like why? Why make this shift when your customers are so used to doing it a certain way, and you’re going to come in and disrupt everything? I mean, especially like Adobe was a massive business, but why do this?

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, so I think the main thing is it’s a fundamentally…

different way on how you do business when you sell a perpetual versus when you sell a subscription obviously, right? So and so it means that You know you have to do so much stuff to be able to sustain a constant cash flow so, you know every time you release a software version and And you want people to upgrade you need to pay money for it, you know with paid ads your time on sending out emails

these things and it’s just very, it’s not a sustainable way to grow a business like that. And I think at that time, more and more companies really wanted to get into the subscription part because they know how much they can do within their company if they would have a working sustainable subscription model, you’d be able to grow faster, hire more people, you will have a, you don’t need to spend.

as much every time you’re trying to sell an upgrade to your software. So yeah, it’s kind of the holy grail you want.

David Vogelpohl  

It’s, yeah, and I have, I’ve known a lot of people that have one time software businesses and have participated in them at very deep levels on multiple occasions. And you know, you pointed out it was like the release is everything, right? Like the next version of Photoshop is like going to be the big moneymaker for Adobe or something. I mean, it sounds like that was the case at Capture One as well.

where these major releases have to be coupled with marketing and go-to-market efforts and the features in them and the go-to-market had better work or you’re gonna miss your revenue and there’s not much you can do about that because you’re not getting a lot of lift from the work you did before. Is that a fair way to assess that situation at Capture One?

Fred Linfjärd  

Absolutely and it’s not just about the go to market. This actually trickles down into product development, product management, the way you do releases is so different and more smoother and sustainable when you’re on a subscription model because when you do these upgrade releases, it gets very rushed, right? And you need to make sure that all these different features,

like if I hit the majority of people that has purchase power with the feature release, then I’ll get more money, right? But what if I hit the wrong one? Because some updates you have to do, right? Even if they’re boring, even if they don’t give you that wow thing, you know, to, oh wow, this is a new cool thing, now I’m going to get a lot of new people in, right?

struggle and you may start making wrong choices and you’re actually, you know, degrading your product, I would say even to some point.

David Vogelpohl  

Yeah, that’s a really interesting point. And then of course, you’re kind of incentivized to keep your best features for your next major release. And so the combination of those things really moves away from kind of agile methodologies and continuous improvement and really kind of creates these like blockbuster moments for your release, which can be put pressure on your roadmap in the ways you kind of talked about. So.

Fred Linfjärd  

You always have to trump them also, right? So every time there’s gotta be something more cooler and cooler.

David Vogelpohl  

All right, totally. And you’re really trying to earn the renewal, effectively, from the customer. The other issue I found, at least in my own experience, was this idea of maintenance, where especially if you don’t necessarily version it and charge for the next version or something, like maybe you’re giving away lifetime updates or something like that, it can start to put pressure on your return for maintaining that older software that people might

still rely on for some reason. Was that an issue at Capture One, or was maintenance of prior versions not much of a concern when you thought about subscriptions versus one time?

Fred Linfjärd  

I think that I, uh, capture one. I don’t, I think I never seen such a generous, uh, you know, maintenance thing. I think we were, uh, and I think we suffered off an old Yula or something because it’s like, yeah, we will make sure you have updates for, you know, the next 10 years or something. Yeah. And, and, I mean, obviously we had to go in and, and change that anyways, but it’s, uh, and, and even if you don’t even, people might not even write.

David Vogelpohl  

Forever!

Fred Linfjärd  

that in their Ula and then people might just, well you don’t, you’re not saying that you shouldn’t update and keep it up to date so where’s my update you know?

David Vogelpohl  

Yeah, even if you don’t say it, you still might have negative community sentiment. If like your two versions prior torches someone’s photo business or something like that, um, and then that can have ramifications that put pressure on you to just do it anyways, basically.

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, definitely.

David Vogelpohl  

Um, you know, it’s interesting. You, you brought up the kind of forever updates. I brought up updates, you know, kind of the conversation led to the idea of like forever maintenance. And, you know, I’ve worked in acquisitions and led acquisitions in the past. And one of the things that often comes up in diligence when a business has a product like that. And I remember hearing this one time from a finance person. That was really funny. Um, they were trying to understand the risk over time.

Fred Linfjärd  

Hehehe

David Vogelpohl  

of buying the business and what the business had to deliver for their customers. And they said, David, they promised infinite upgrade or updates. I can’t divide by infinity. And so I was like, yeah, you can’t look at that. So, uh, so, so this kind of gets us to the KPI side and we talked about, you know, I asked you like, why do this? And you know, it was funny. One thing you didn’t mention was a lot about was you’ll make a bunch more money because you can build on that revenue and success. You talked a lot about the.

Fred Linfjärd  

Hahaha

David Vogelpohl  

the kind of greater benefits. But let’s kind of get down to the KPI. Like what are the primary KPI people really should be paying attention to, you know, as they embark on an adventure to make this kind of shift? Like what should be on their dashboard?

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, so I mean, so they’re fundamentally different when you think about, when I think back about how we ran the business on a perpetual metrics, like you wouldn’t see inkling or a metric that would indicate that our customers are satisfied. Like that usually don’t exist on a perpetual dashboard.

Contra to a subscription dashboard where you have metrics like CLV or customer lifetime value, that really indicates that if that goes down, it means really that people are not happy with the product. And follow up on that, you have the churn metric. So how many people are leaving your business either by voluntary churn, so they cancel it because they’re not happy.

And then you have, of course, the typical recurring revenue metrics like MRR or ARR, right, mostly recurring revenue and annual recurring revenue that just kind of builds up, right, that it’s like a stair. It will always go up, right? And you can work towards increasing those. So it’s a very different way of doing business. So it also goes into…

that this becomes a little bit of a change management exercise. There’s so many different things. This is not the traditional pricing exercise like you might do in SaaS or something like that where you go in and you have product marketing and you like you try different pricing. This is goes into the whole business, you know, how you go to market, how you measure your business, how you develop your product. And I think that’s where it usually fails.

or it becomes a struggle, it takes longer time, because there’s many different departments and people that need to basically follow a very disciplined plan, which you don’t really know yet. So you kind of have to chop it up and kind of test your way forward, have a very kind of, I mean, you really need like a project manager to say, or put together a…

Fred Linfjärd  

of people that are working with this, you know, dedicatedly and not have like five different other jobs to do, if that makes sense. I know I went over the off topic here a little bit with the key metrics but…

David Vogelpohl  

Yeah it does.

No, it’s good because I think you kind of clued in a little bit. When people make this change, there’s often the need to make changes. And to your point, you have to make changes in your organization. Like even your billing people need to be trained on the new thing. Their systems of course, need to be changed tech support people. And you kind of mentioned product. And it’s funny because when I’ve seen people make this, when I’ve seen companies make this shift. Wait.

The question that usually comes up from the audience is, why should I pay recurring now? And so this becomes like a driving force for these teams as they’re starting to think about how to roll it out. It’s like, how are we gonna justify it to the community? And I’ve seen many times that the new recurring offering has some sort of like new product features like baked into it that is an additional benefit above and beyond the one time. Has that been your experience or was that, you know,

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah.

David Vogelpohl  

Capture One approached it.

Fred Linfjärd  

Oh yeah, definitely. And that’s also, uh, the biggest, uh, I would say obstacle. It’s that fear that are we basically just nuking our business by doing this? Everyone’s going to, to leave, right? And it is not actually, uh, that because you have to think about it. Uh, you have, you have to segment your customers, right?

Right? So you have new people that are coming in. Like they don’t really know, right? So every new person that comes in, if you only have a subscription, they came to get your software. I mean, if they’re motivated, they’re not going to leave just because there’s no perpetual, right? So you can put them to the side there. And that’s really what your goal is to grow your business, right? Because if you think about it,

the metric of customer lifetime value, which means that you’re gonna work and make more money on your existing customers, that’s really a subscription metric. But you’re trying to apply it to a perpetual business that is not gonna be profitable. So I would segment it into these different buckets, new and current. And then I will take the current bucket and I would put in, you know.

the VIP group, the early adopters or the really hardcore people that can, if something happens and they are not happy, they could just blow up social media. You need to have a backup plan for these, right? And then you have the existing customers that, okay, well, we’re not making this much money. Like let’s say they buy the software and they’ve never upgraded. They buy the software and maybe upgrade every third time.

You try to just get those that upgrade every time. Every time there’s a new release. You… And you want to make an offer for them. So… That would work for them, right? Also.

David Vogelpohl  

Good.

David Vogelpohl  

Yeah, absolutely. And like you’re talking kind of about a bit of a recurring revenue model. And I think like when you have one time fees, but you charge for the next version, in other words, you don’t get free lifetime upgrades or something like that, then their rate of buying the updated versions essentially becomes their recurring revenue. And the collection of those transactions is their LTV.

And so like when you were thinking through the KPI, as you embarked on this, some of the things you said in this response so far was like my signups. Are they, I’m guessing you were looking at like, did they go up or down? Cause now we’re a subscription for new customers. Um, you were probably wondering about your, um, churn rate by the end of the year and what the, what you think the LTV of those subscriptions would be.

Fred Linfjärd  

Mm-hmm.

David Vogelpohl  

And then I’m guessing you might have compared that to what you thought the LTV of your one-time download customers were. Is this kind of how you might think of the blend, at least on the new customer side?

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, I mean, we tried a lot to try to like, how do you calculate churn on upgrades, right? Because every time we need to sell an upgrade, they need to fork out their credit card. So it’s really hard. And especially when you’re doing the switch like us, we had, you’re living in that no man’s land where you have perpetual and you have subscriptions. And I hope we’ll get into that also because that is a place that’s hard to be in.

And you’re trying to also calculate the business with these two very, very different motions and becomes really, really hard to do. Right. Um, so I don’t have that answered.

David Vogelpohl  

Did you look at the data separately for brand new customers versus the one-time download historical customers? In other words, were you tracking the adoption rate from the old customers for the new offering?

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, we looked at that and we tried to look at it separately and here it —

David Vogelpohl  

Was it a focus or was it just like leave them alone? They already bought it. If they want the new thing, they’ll buy it. Or did you actively try to get them to convert?

Fred Linfjärd  

Well, we tried to actively get them to convert, but we also saw that was really hard because you’re talking with everyone, right? Especially, I don’t know if you’re, if you don’t have the most advanced automation setup, which we, in the end, we actually did have a good setup, but you’re talking with everyone, which means that you’re going to talk to these people that I bought the perpetual license, I own this and now I’m going to rent it, you know? And it’s like, you know,

David Vogelpohl  

That right, right.

Fred Linfjärd  

And you know, and they’re gonna make noise, right? So you need to have a plan for that and not try to, yeah, and not try to look at it in the same way. But the problem here, David, is that it’s focus. Like how are you going to focus on switching to perpetual when you’re doing that, you know, your peak revenues?

Right? Every upgrade. That’s where all the money comes in. Right? And now you’re going to switch to, you know, that instead you don’t get that focus, which means you’re kind of slowly dying or, or it’s really, really hard to, to maintain a business like that. That’s why you need a really, really solid plan with steps and success metrics and also have the, have the, have the guts to kind of follow in on it. Then you see some company does and there’s going to be people leaving. Right?

but you gotta have faith in your product and the offer that you create on that subscription that it’s fair, that it makes sense, that it’s easy to get out of and then come into again, that kind of stuff. I don’t know, I’m babbling here. The message sends. Ha ha.

David Vogelpohl  

I do. Yeah, it does. It does. And I do want to kind of get in a little bit into the, like, the aspect of like, well, what entitlements do you offer? And how do you think about that in your strategy? But let’s just say entitlements are the same between your subscription and one time offering. What what are the benefits?

to the end customer for buying software through a subscription? Like, you know, nobody ever wants to rent their thing, I guess, but I mean, certainly there’s a benefit for them and not just the company, but what are some benefits of buying software and a subscription model over one time? Obviously costs might be a negative, but what are some good things about it for the end customer?

Fred Linfjärd  

Well, I mean, for once, if you do it right, you know, it’s always the latest version, right? When you’re on the subscription. So you don’t have to fork out 300 or 400 bucks to get that one feature.

And it’s a more, it can be a more maintainable steady sum that you paid 20, 20 euro or whatever it is monthly, or maybe it’s annually. And if you don’t need it anymore, then you don’t have to pay. Right. Then, and, and I think now that’s the normal, but I think back then it wasn’t really, especially not for

the people that feel that, well, I mean, I want to own it. I mean, so you kind of have to, I think maintenance is that one part. And I also think you can shape the offer. So it’s, you get something different with the subscription. Like you get something that you don’t get with the perpetual. And that would be a strategy to play around with, right? So.

So that’s the benefit of the subscription that I see, right? It’s the play, pause kinda thing, and you can kinda, it’s predictable, right? Your cost and what you get out of it. You know that you always will get the latest, and maybe some more, hopefully.

David Vogelpohl  

Yeah, and it’s interesting, you talked about how at that time, making a reference to the idea that people are more used to paying subscription fees for software products these days, I’m guessing a big part in thanks to the rise of SaaS, but also thanks in the rise of downloadable software companies switching to subscription for all the reasons we just talked about.

And so it does feel like there’s less and less options in particular niches to pay one-time fees for software. And it seems like people are getting more used to it. I do think there’s a decent amount of ignorance out there around what is required to properly maintain software and operate a successful software business. But I think just the emotional side of like I don’t wanna rent my software, especially if you’re in a space where that hasn’t really been done much.

be trouble, but it does seem like the sentiment has been changing, especially both from the consumer side, but also from the software company side. Do you agree with that or would you think of that differently?

Fred Linfjärd  

No, I think so. I definitely think so. And I think it’s important to also think in ways on kind of stretching your product offering. Like you can have both. It shouldn’t just, but it should never be the same with some exceptions. Like you have your base product, right? That should be your subscription, but then you can add on, you know, like with Capture One, we had style packs that we came up with.

and which filters that you can kind of sell and you can you can play around with those things and bundle it and include it in subscription or have it standalone or whatever. But you should have your core should always be in one model either perpetual or in subscription and I mean or you find a hybrid like Atlassian or some of those guys that you know I buy it.

for 300 bucks and then I pay a fee, monthly fee for having it fully up to date. And when I stopped paying, well, then I still own the software. I can still use it, but it’ll never get updated again. Stuff like that is, is things that you can think about. So it’s very dependent on how your business is. Yeah.

David Vogelpohl  

Pay for the updates model, yep. I like the pay for the updates model. The other one I really like is where you charge the subscription for feature sets within the software. So the core software stays the same, but you have like an add-on pack that’s like SAS enabled or something like that. And then you do the subscription that way. I’ve seen people find success with that.

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I mean, I think, I mean, especially in, in B2B SaaS versus, I don’t know what you call it, like, uh, or other types of SaaS that, that maybe isn’t the type that Planday has, like a Planday type B2B SaaS, we have our three plans, right? But I think it’s important to think about different ways to monetize and use.

constantly modularize your software because that unlocks these different you know growth levers that you can work with because it’s always going to be a better business practice to get money from your existing customers Than always trying to get new right always trying to get new

David Vogelpohl  

Cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new one, that’s for sure. OK, so it sounds like in general, though, when you think of subscriptions and the shift from one time to subscriptions,

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah.

David Vogelpohl  

It does sound like you do like to include additional features and not just like a one-for-one switch. And those new entitlements or features are kind of sweetening the pot for the existing customers to adopt the subscription model. Is that a fair summary?

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, yeah, I definitely think so. I mean, in the end of the day, you’re going to have to try to convince these customers. But I think it’s also important to, as I said in the beginning, it’s totally okay with doing grandfathering, right? And if you have these group of hardcore players, you can have something special, like kind

them to be quiet kind of deal or whatever like that because they are advocates right and you have to remember that but it doesn’t mean that applies to all so it’s important with the segmentation on your on your business and your existing customer base and also the customer base that you want or you’re trying to penetrate the new vertical or something.

David Vogelpohl  

You know, it’s funny you bring up this idea of legacy entitlements. Like I have old customers and I’m gonna let them keep the same entitlements. And it’s only new people that are affected by the new way. The idea of like grandfathering, I guess. Um, you know, I have a memory of my own rollout for this at one point. And, uh, we, you know, did legacy entitlements, let people keep their old stuff, but people didn’t.

read it that way. They thought we were changing it for them and they still got mad and social blew up. I spent the whole week on chasing down Facebook and Twitter threads. It was pretty bad. But we just didn’t clearly state, I guess, high enough in the announcement that it was their legacy entitlements. And so you try and try and try to make the rollout.

Accepted by the community and like no matter what you do Some people are gonna get mad and I’ve rarely seen a company rolled this out where there wasn’t The community kind of getting up and arms around it. I’ve seen people do better and worse jobs at it But it always happens in my view Or at least from what I’ve seen What are some techniques? How can you approach your rollout? Where you reduce the chances that people get mad?

Fred Linfjärd  

I mean, I think to me it’s simple. I’m not, and, and I don’t, the way I, if I would do this, uh, again, the way I would try to do it, it’s really, really going deep with the customers before you roll it out and really talk about it and, uh, and, uh, you know, have a, have a solid customer community where you can actually, I think it’s fair to be able to ask these questions and say why you’re doing it.

of the day you’re doing it to make the to be able to make the software better to add more people to have to continue on the business and like really be frank and that’s why we need to do this shift and like so you can talk with them and say and ask them questions so i would go much spend a lot of time with the focus groups and really trying to test the different aspects of what i’m

Fred Linfjärd  

Surprise!

David Vogelpohl  

And of course for everybody else it’ll be a surprise but it sounds like what you’re saying is by doing those focus groups you can kind of listen in advance and be prepared for your rollout plan.

Fred Linfjärd  

I mean, it’s only a surprise for existing customers. It’s not a surprise for your new customers because they don’t… That’s kind of how I… So we gotta make sure that the existing ones that it will work for that as well. I mean, it’s kind of the same as, you know, when you have a software that…

And you’re trying to hit the new vertical like I said and you need to do something with the software You got to make sure that you’re not screwing up for the other people that are depending on the software To do to do work, right? Because that’s very easy to do like you’re trying to make it simple the software and all of a sudden It becomes harder for the people that are advanced just adds on to their so So yeah trying to think of it in those ways

David Vogelpohl  

Yeah, I remember. I remember working with some finance executives during some of these times from my past and I remember one of them asking like, all right, why is everybody getting so upset? And I’m like, they’re using this tool to do a job and you just messed up their workflow or, you know, we just messed up their workflow. So, um, it is really interesting to think about like the impact that you have on people when you make this change, does it.

change their underlying business model. Like if I’m a photographer and you go to subscription for Capture One software and then all of a sudden you jack it up, you know, 10X what I was gonna spend last year on it, maybe you messed up my photography business or something like that. I’m not saying they all went to that extreme, but I think the impact side is a really important side. I’m glad you brought that up.

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely. And I even think that there were some instances where that happened and we had to roll back fairly fast. So it’s a tough one. I mean, I think it goes back into when you do this, that you also, I mean, the finance part is important, like, because there’s going to be a different type of.

money that’s coming in. Right? I mean, if you’re starting from no subscriptions, right, then you’re starting with very little money that will build up under slow time. So you need to be able to, okay, well, can we afford this switch and how much is going to this investment cost before we’re starting to see the flip where it starts to kind of the flywheel starts to…

uh, you know, actually be more and more profitable. So, uh, I think that’s important because that’s where that’s preventing this. You, oh no, we’re not getting enough money. Stop everything. Let’s do these, uh, you know, 50% campaigns, you know, 50% off, 50% off or, or stuff like that, you know.

David Vogelpohl  

Yeah, a good partnership with your finance team. That’s a great point. And so then on the keeping customers during the transition, managing the negative feedback from the community that such a shift might cause, it sounded like you were suggesting folks talk to their customers in advance and learn what the concerns will be. I also heard you mention Be Frank.

And I think like if I had two points, I would share about this transition. It would be in your announcement email. Put the legacy entitlements at the top of the email, start with who’s not affected because that’s the people that are going to complain first. And if they, if you start with your reasoning, like we we’re changing our business because of reasons, they’re just going to say you’re switching me to subscription and go, you know, go to hell or whatever.

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah.

David Vogelpohl  

And so, and the second one is be frank though, and that was what you mentioned, and it was like, don’t use the flowery language, just tell them what you’re doing, like an adult, tell them why. And if it’s for business reasons, and you need a successful growing business to continue to invest in the software they love, be honest about that. That was my take, it sounded like some overlap with yours, but how do you think about that?

Fred Linfjärd  

I mean…

Fred Linfjärd  

No, that is exactly that. Be frank and honest. And I think I would add another one. I mean, use your advocates. I mean, try to win over a customer like one-on-one or invite them in for drinks and try to get them to help, get them to help you in the community if you have that to try to help this transition. Because many times

And especially in the Capture One, a lot of customers that are like the old one, the really pros, they would help people, right? And they can help you advocate for it. And they kind of try to bicker with each other and like, well, you know, they’re just doing it for money. And then someone comes in and is like, well, yeah, I mean, but, you know, it takes money to continue to provide the software for us. So, you know, we got to…

that there that is a good reason so a lot of those conversations can be solved by you know advocate advocacy customers so

David Vogelpohl  

Yeah, I’ve had success in the past with, I’ve had success, I’ve had success in the past with like advocacy boards, advisory, I’m sorry, advisory boards with software where you can start to build up.

you know, folks that are contributing and giving insights for the roadmap and how the community is managed. But then also, of course, they themselves can become advocates. And sometimes they agree with the decisions and sometimes they don’t, but I found that to be helpful. And then like you said, to being frank, what I found was that when we were frank, people would read it, understand it. And if somebody else in a thread or forum somewhere was complaining about it,

they would say, well, this was a reason and it seemed pretty reasonable to me, but I understand you don’t wanna pay more or something like that. But not even people we spoke to, but because we were frank, people started being frank with how they explained it to others when it came up. So did you have any similar experiences?

Fred Linfjärd  

Uh, yeah, uh, I’m just going to.

Fred Linfjärd  

silly uh… where we pick up

David Vogelpohl  

So that was my experience. Did you have anything similar?

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, I mean, I think so. And I think it really, it’s really nice to see those communities fight for you. I mean, it’s really, really great. It’s such a tremendous help. And I think, you know, building a great product and building a brand, that’s what you get.

you can get these really advocates and you need to really, really take care of them. And with your customer support team being in the front lines or your CSMs, make sure that they get treated. And the way we did this, I think in Capture One, we looked at when we got customer support cases, we always looked…

try to look which group they were in. And if we saw that, okay, well, if this was a customer, if they asked a question like that, hey, even if they were wrong, if we see that they’ve been with us for 10 years and they’ve been an active user, I mean, we would do anything right for them to be happy, even if it’s like, well, it was their fault that they, whatever it may be, I can’t think of what it is. But I…

David Vogelpohl  

It’s such a great example because it in my mind is such a critical part of all this, which is to show folks that you care. Like if you care about the future of the product, if you care about the quality of the product, if you care about your customer’s experience with it, and you care about making the shift from one time to recurring successful for both the company and the customer. That goes so far in helping folks understand why a business might be changing the billing model and I think from my experience I’ve seen people really respond and recognize that it sounds like that was a strategy for you all there at Capture One.

Fred Linfjärd  

Yeah, definitely.

David Vogelpohl  

Awesome. Well, this has been great. I wish we had more time next time we’re in person. We’ll have to run our next Zoom call together or something. We’ll have to nerd out about this. But thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your story here. I think there’s folks who have a lot of value, especially if they’re thinking about going through this themselves. Thanks, Fred.

Fred  

Yeah.

Fred  

Yeah, thank you so much David. It’s a great topic to talk about.

David Vogelpohl  

Half my gray hairs are from that kind of migration. So good luck to anyone out there gaining your own gray hairs right now. If you’d like to learn more about what Fred is up to, you can look him up on LinkedIn. Thanks, everyone, for joining us here on the Growth Stage podcast. I’m your host, David Vogelpohl. Really appreciate you joining us today. And enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks, everybody.

The post EP19: Successfully Switching From One-Time Fees to Subscriptions appeared first on FastSpring.

It’s a capable solution, but by no means is Paddle a universal, one-size-fits-all option. Depending on your needs, sellers may run into a number of potential limitations with the Paddle platform:

• Paddle doesn’t accept as many alternative payment methods as other MoR partners.
• The subscription management system doesn’t support multi-product transactions.
• Other MoRs boast higher conversion and approval rates.
• Paddle is less experienced than other MoR partners.

In this guide, we discuss five service providers that function in whole or in part as alternatives to Paddle that may help you avoid some of these limits, starting with a look at our solution, FastSpring.

Paddle competitors in this list:

• FastSpring.
• Stripe.
• 2Checkout (now Verifone).
• Braintree by PayPal.
• Maxio (formerly Chargify and SaaSOptics).

Are you looking for a Paddle alternative that will partner with you to grow your business internationally? FastSpring is an experienced merchant of record that provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, and digital goods businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

FastSpring

Unlike many Paddle competitors, FastSpring is a merchant of record (MoR) and the most direct alternative to Paddle. As an MoR, our platform handles a lot more than just standalone payment gateways or subscription management software solutions.

FastSpring includes global payment processing and recurring revenue management, of course, but the platform also takes care of the end-to-end checkout process, including optimization of your checkout flow, collecting and remitting sales tax and VAT, localization, fraud prevention, global compliance, and more.

FastSpring’s Advantages Over Paddle

The main benefit to partnering with a merchant of record is the infrastructure. MoRs are complete payment solutions that enable you to outsource the entire checkout process, as well as liability for sales tax and VAT remittance, fraud prevention, and tax compliance.

That means that once you implement FastSpring, you’re ready to start selling — in more than 200 regions, with support for 21+ languages and 23+ currencies — almost instantly.

FastSpring offers a more robust, fully-featured platform that can support more use cases.

Paddle is also an MoR, but its functionality isn’t as robust, nor is the platform as effective as FastSpring. Our ecommerce solution is built to cover all your bases, so you can focus on building a great product. That’s why FastSpring includes a deeper, more robust set of features than Paddle.

• FastSpring supports 20+ payment methods, including additional alternative methods Paddle doesn’t accept such as checks, Pix, and wire transfers for transactions under US$100.
• With our JavaScript Store Builder Library (SBL), you can completely customize, brand, and streamline your checkout flow, building trust with buyers and eliminating friction. The SBL includes tracking and testing tools to help monitor and improve your conversion rate, too. 
• FastSpring also powers multi-product transactions, allowing you to offer customers product bundles, upsells, and multi-product coupons.

FastSpring delivers industry-leading approval and conversion rates.

FastSpring’s platform processes transactions locally, includes best-in-class intelligent payment routing, and has quick, automatic failover processing to minimize involuntary churn. Plus, with our JavaScript library and three different checkout experiences, you can quickly and easily build the best-converting checkout flow for your business.

FastSpring is a more experienced, knowledgeable partner for your SaaS business.

We’ve been working in this space since 2005, and we’ve seen the growth of the subscription business firsthand. Our team intimately understands the complexities of subscription billing and selling — and we’re deeply committed to helping our customers grow.

Whether that means providing customer support to help you migrate from another payment processor or recurring billing solution, optimizing your checkout process to boost revenue, or working with you to expand into new regions, we’re your partner in growth.

Are you looking for a Paddle alternative that will partner with you to grow your business internationally? FastSpring is an experienced merchant of record that provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, and digital goods businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

4 Additional Paddle Alternatives

Stripe

Stripe is best known as an online payment processor that enables you to accept credit cards, debit cards, and mobile payments. Stripe is not an MoR, but the company does offer add-on products that include additional features such as:

• Checkout.
• Digital invoices.
• Subscription and recurring payment collection.
• In-person payments.
• Revenue metrics and analytics.
• Fraud and risk management.

The most crucial difference to note is that, since Stripe isn’t a MoR, its pricing looks a lot lower to begin with — but with all the add-ons needed to make it function like an MoR, that price will go up quickly.

It can also be used to sell physical products, both online and in person, with Stripe Terminal serving as a Point of Sale (PoS) solution, too.

2Checkout (now Verifone)

Verifone (formerly 2Checkout) offers a number of different products and services:

• The core 2Sell product is a payment gateway that enables sellers to accept online and mobile payments.
• 2Subscribe is a subscription management system that offers features such as recurring billing and churn prevention.
• 2Monetize is the most similar product to Paddle. With this package, Verifone acts as the MoR, and sellers gain features for conversion rate optimization (CRO), sales tax and VAT collection and remittance, and fraud prevention.

Braintree by PayPal

Braintree from PayPal is a payment processor that enables customers to accept online payments via credit, debit, Venmo (in the U.S.), digital wallets (Apple Pay and Google Pay), and — of course — PayPal. Braintree also offers merchant accounts, as well as:

• Recurring billing.
• Optimized checkout flow.
• Risk mitigation.
• Reporting and pricing analytics.
• Third-party integrations for recurring billing software, accounting, and more.

Maxio (Formerly Chargify and SaaSOptics)

Maxio is neither an MoR nor a payment gateway. Instead, the company bills itself as billing and financial operations for B2B SaaS, and the featureset is much more focused on back-end operations. 

The core Maxio product enables users to automate recurring billing. Other features include:

• A/R management.
• Advanced revenue management.
• Expense amortization.
• Third-party integrations for payment processing, CRM, accounting, and more.

An important note: With Maxio, you’ll still need to implement another, separate solution to manage taxes and compliance.

Are you looking for a Paddle alternative that will partner with you to grow your business internationally? FastSpring is an experienced merchant of record that provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, and digital goods businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and consumer support. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

Related Reading

• Find out Why TestDome Considers FastSpring a Real Partner for Selling Software Online.
• Learn more about the merchant of record business model, including how an MoR like FastSpring can handle all of the tedious billing tasks such as keeping track of the ever-changing VAT, sales tax, and compliance laws — empowering you to reduce your payment, sales tax, and subscription management stack down to one while retaining control over your customer data and relationships and taking your business global instantly.
• Discover more about FastSpring’s developer tools, including:
  • Our powerful and customizable JavaScript Store Builder Library (SBL) to seamlessly embed FastSpring experiences into your website or app without custom API configurations.
  • Reliable and fast REST APIs to connect FastSpring, your site, and back office systems (including Salesforce).
  • Extensive JSON-based webhooks to reduce API calls and reliably listen to events on FastSpring to trigger actions in your app, website, or business systems.
• 2Checkout vs. Stripe vs. FastSpring: Comparing Payments, Taxes, and Platform Features (+ Pricing) 
• 8 Best Chargebee Alternatives and Competitors (And How They’re Different)

The post 5 Best Paddle Alternatives in 2024 appeared first on FastSpring.