Your payments infrastructure is the foundation that determines whether you can scale globally, retain customers, and actually make money on each transaction. AI app builders face unique monetization challenges — from evolving regulations and taxes to the potential for more frequent chargebacks — that require more than a basic payment processor can solve for.

Below, we walk through:

• The SaaS fundamentals every AI app business needs to master.
• Monetization challenges unique to AI businesses.
• How to monetize a web app versus a mobile app.
• How FastSpring can help.

FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, VAT/GST and sales tax compliance, consumer payments support, and many other aspects of payments management. Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time building groundbreaking AI products! Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

Start With SaaS Fundamentals

At their most basic, the majority of AI apps are still fundamentally SaaS businesses. Whether it’s a monthly subscription to your writing assistant or an annual plan for your analytics platform, the majority of AI tools run on recurring revenue.

So while you may be selling AI services instead of project management software, the core monetization principles are similar to those of subscription businesses.

Before diving into AI-specific challenges, you should nail the basics — things such as:

• Communicating well with customers around subscription terms, payments, and any changes to your business or delivery model.
• Managing and mitigating churn.
• Choosing a payment provider.

But subscriptions come with complexity. You also need to handle free trial conversions, manage failed payments through dunning processes, and deal with upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations.

Companies that have navigated this model (such as FastSpring customer Stardock) know you need a payment partner built specifically for subscription management — not just one that can process one-time charges.

Things to Consider When Selling Software or Apps Globally

When you’re selling AI apps worldwide, you need to solve several problems simultaneously:

Preferred payments and checkout that vary by region. Localized payment methods are critical for conversion. Customers expect to see prices in their currency and be able to pay using familiar methods. Customers in the U.S., for example, expect to see Apple Pay and Google Pay, while customers in Brazil prefer to pay with Pix, and customers in India want to use UPI.

Global tax calculation and remittance. If you’re selling digital services to customers based in the EU, you need to collect VAT at each buyer’s local rate and file those taxes accordingly. In the U.S., sales tax requirements vary state by state, and some states even let individual counties or cities set their own rates and rules. Each requires separate filing. Handling this yourself means registering with tax authorities in, potentially, hundreds of jurisdictions. Plus, you’re liable for any fines or penalties resulting from doing so incorrectly.

Data and platform governance. You need to process payment data securely according to regional requirements, meet data residency rules in certain jurisdictions, and maintain PCI compliance. These aren’t optional — they’re legal requirements that can shut you down or cost you hefty penalties if not followed.

Why You Want a Merchant of Record (Not Just a Payment Processor)

When choosing how to handle payments, your first and crucial choice is whether to use a basic payment service provider (PSP) or partner with a merchant of record (MoR).

A payment service provider (such as Stripe) gives you the tools to process transactions, but you remain legally responsible for every transaction. You’re in charge of calculating, collecting, and remitting taxes — in every jurisdiction where your customers live — and you carry the liability for any fraud. (Stripe is launching an MoR service, but how it will perform is still unknown.)

A merchant of record, on the other hand, becomes the legal seller of your product. FastSpring is an MoR, so we assume liability for transactions — meaning you can spend less time worrying about managing taxes and chargebacks and more time building a great product.

As the liable party for the sale, an MoR such as FastSpring handles:

• Global tax compliance. You don’t need to figure out VAT rates across EU countries, navigate state-by-state sales tax rules in the U.S. (and in some cases even city-by-city variations), or file returns in those jurisdictions. An MoR automatically calculates, collects, and remits those taxes for you.
• Consumer support for payment issues. When someone’s card declines or they have a billing question, your MoR’s support team handles it.
• Fraud prevention and risk management. Using a simple payment service provider and acting as your own merchant of record could lead to less financial industry credibility, as AI services are often perceived as riskier than other tech verticals — and in turn, that could lead to lower approval rates. Conversely, the established credibility of an experienced merchant of record such as FastSpring (with over two decades of experience!) helps improve transaction approval rates, which means higher revenue and less headaches.
• Checkout and payment localization. Instantly offer global payment localization including currency conversion, checkout translation, global tax management, and localized payment processing.
• Global compliance. Your MoR maintains PCI-DSS certification, data protection regulations, and customer authentication requirements so you don’t have to. Learn more in FastSpring’s Trust Center.

FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, VAT/GST and sales tax compliance, consumer payments support, and many other aspects of payments management. Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time building groundbreaking AI products! Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

Questions to Ask When Evaluating Payment Solutions

Before committing to a payment solution — be it a payment processor or merchant of record — ask these questions to help you evaluate:

• Does it handle global tax collection and remittance automatically, or do you need to register, collect, and file in every jurisdiction where your customers live?
• Which payment methods are supported? Can customers in your target market(s) use their preferred options?
• How does it handle subscription management? What about usage-based or metered billing? Does it offer a portal for customers to self-manage subscriptions, billing, and payment methods on file?
• Does providing consumer payment support fall to you or to your payment provider?
• Does it integrate with your existing tech stack?
• What are your actual, all-in costs — including processing fees, tax filing, compliance management, and operational overhead? 

What Makes AI Different: Unique Monetization Challenges

Once you’ve nailed the fundamentals for subscription-based businesses, you can begin to grapple with the unique challenges of monetizing an AI app.

Operating in a Young, High-Growth Market = Constant Change

AI companies are scaling globally faster than almost any previous software category. You’re not gradually expanding into new markets over several years — you’re able to serve customers worldwide pretty much from day one.

This creates challenges that more mature software categories simply didn’t face when they were at the same stage. Burgeoning AI companies are now faced with:

• Regulatory landscapes that vary dramatically by region, especially as they apply to digital services businesses. Evolving tax regulations (especially on digital goods or services) create compliance requirements that change based on where your customers are located — and these regulations will continue to emerge, grow, and evolve across the globe. For example, in 2024, five U.S. states simplified their criteria for tax nexus, which meant more businesses might meet the criteria for nexus sooner than they expected to — including digital goods businesses. And in 2025, the Philippines extended its VAT legislation to cover digital services supplied by foreign companies to consumers in the Philippines. If you use an MoR such as FastSpring, the MoR will worry about staying up to date with those types of regulations so you don’t have to.
• Evolving customer expectations and pricing norms. Unlike established software categories where pricing patterns are well understood, AI pricing is more fluid. Customers aren’t yet sure what they should pay, and you may not be sure what you should charge. To quickly and easily pivot your pricing as needed, choose a payment partner with agile pricing tools. For instance, FastSpring’s flexible Store Builder Library makes it easy for software and app sellers to update their product pricing quickly.
• Overly cautious payment processors. As we mentioned above, because the category is new and patterns aren’t established, some payment processors may be more likely to treat AI as high-risk. But since FastSpring processes billions of dollars across numerous software categories and has been for 20+ years, partnering with us means that you’ll benefit from better approval rates. Banks see transactions coming from a known, trusted entity with a proven track record, not an unproven AI startup.
• Technical challenges with usage-based billing. Unlike SaaS products that have been more commonly monetized with traditional monthly or annual subscriptions, AI services are particularly well served by usage-based billing, so support for that feature is something you’ll likely want from a monetization partner. If you want to be able to charge users in combination with real-time metering and tracking of usage, your backend needs to integrate with your payment systems. FastSpring supports usage-based billing through API integration and webhooks.

Monetizing AI Web Apps vs. AI Mobile Apps

Your monetization strategy will differ depending on whether you’re building a web app, a mobile app, or both.

AI Web Apps: The Direct Approach

Web-based AI apps have built-in advantages for monetization:

• No mandatory iOS and Android platform fees.
• Full control over the customer relationship.
• Direct access to first-party customer data.

To make web monetization work, you need:

• An optimized checkout experience with multiple payment methods, localized currencies, and trust signals that convince customers you’re legitimate and secure.
• A subscription management portal where customers can self-serve to upgrade, downgrade, view usage, update payment methods, and access their billing history.
• Integration flexibility through APIs for usage-based billing, webhooks for entitlements, and backend system connections that tie everything together.

FastSpring’s JavaScript Store Builder Library lets you quickly create a branded, seamless checkout experience that feels native to your app environment, while handling all the back-end complexity for you.

AI Mobile Apps: The App2Web Opportunity

If you’re building a mobile AI app, you’re facing 15-30% platform fees that eat into your margins. For AI apps with high compute costs, losing nearly a third of revenue to platform fees can strain the calculus at best  —  or make the economics totally unworkable at worst.

But that’s the cost of doing business with iOS and Android, right?

Not necessarily.

With app2web and web2app monetization strategies, you can sell an AI app outside popular app stores. You can recover some of that lost revenue by building a web store to monetize via the web and offering customers some kind of incentive — discounts, upgrades, in-app usage bonuses, etc. — for buying directly from you.

By doing so, you:

• Minimize the transactions on which you incur those hefty commission fees.
• Gain access to valuable first-party customer data that enables smarter acquisition campaigns, personalized promotions, and better lifecycle marketing.
• Improve margins, which is crucial when you’re paying for compute on every transaction.

While regulations around in-app steering and promotion of outside payment options vary from region to region and are ever evolving, you can always:

• Distribute your product through a web store. Selling your app’s solution directly to your consumers through your own store is an increasingly common and effective monetization strategy.
• Market your web store outside the app through social media, Discord communities, Reddit threads, email campaigns, and other channels where you aren’t restricted by app store rules.
• Build a web presence for existing users, and incentivize web store visits through exclusive offers or better pricing.

Making User Acquisition Smarter With First-Party Data

When you monetize through the web, you unlock first-party data that holds the power to supercharge your user acquisition strategy.

You can track attribution accurately, understanding which campaigns drive conversions.

You gain access to email addresses, payment preferences, referral sources, and session behavior — data points that enable sophisticated segmentation.

Then you can turn that valuable data into:

• Localized user acquisition strategies with geographic and behavioral segmentation, region-specific pricing and promotions, and language/payment method optimization.
• Targeted social campaigns where you build custom audiences from web purchasers, create lookalike audiences based on high-intent users, and retarget with actual conversion data instead of guesswork.
• Email marketing automation that drives users to web purchases, re-engages lapsed customers, and converts free users to paid plans.

Monetize Your AI App With FastSpring

FastSpring is built specifically for digital-first businesses that need to monetize globally, without getting bogged down building their own global payments infrastructures — or cobbling them together via disparate payment tools.

Our platform offers:

• Complete merchant of record services covering global tax compliance across 200+ jurisdictions, local payment methods and currencies, fraud prevention and risk management, and PCI compliance and data security.
• AI-friendly billing capabilities including out-of-the-box subscription management, flexible product catalog management, multiple pricing models (flat, tiered, hybrid), and support for usage-based billing (with proper integration).
• Developer-first integration through RESTful APIs for backend connections, webhooks for real-time event notifications, our JavaScript Store Builder Library, integration with RevenueCat for mobile apps, and backend integration for usage-based billing.
• Customizable checkout experiences with branded checkout; your choice of embedded, pop-up, or web storefront experiences support for trials, coupons, and promotions; and management of multiple subscription tiers.
• Fast implementation with quick setup for standard configurations, flexibility for complex requirements, pre-existing  compliance infrastructure, and the ability to focus your engineering resources on AI instead of payments.

FastSpring helps AI app developers navigate the complexity of global monetization and scale successfully. We’ve spent over 20 years helping digital-first companies grow, and we’ve built our platform specifically for businesses like yours.

FastSpring allows you to offload the complexity of global payments, VAT/GST and sales tax compliance, consumer payments support, and many other aspects of payments management. Spend less time managing your payments and compliance and more time building groundbreaking AI products! Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

The post AI Monetization: How AI App Builders Can Handle Pricing, Global Expansion, and Compliance appeared first on FastSpring.

However, many founders quickly discover that the biggest hurdle to global growth isn’t product-market fit — it’s the structural drag of an entirely different set of Western administrative and regulatory requirements.

Companies are often caught off guard by the technical requirements and administrative realities. Moving into the West is not just about switching currencies; it’s a fundamental shift in how you manage your customer lifecycle and your business’s legal footprint.

Every new market demands its own web of legal entities, localized contracts, domestic banking, and tax registrations. That means that a lean, engineering-led startup can quickly become bogged down in legal and finance operations.

Based on FastSpring’s own internal data and our experience helping thousands of sellers scale, here are six proven strategies to navigate the high-stakes transition from APAC into Western markets.

FastSpring is how companies in APAC enter the western market online and in more places around the world. We handle every payment need — from subscription management to tax collection, remittance, and more — so your business can go farther, faster. We’re also the leading merchant of record for global software companies, powering over a billion dollars in worldwide transactions every year. We’ll manage your checkout, VAT and sales taxes, compliance, and more, freeing you to focus on what you do best: building great software. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

1. Leverage the Merchant of Record (MoR) Model

Selecting the right financial architecture is the most critical decision an APAC seller can make when selling beyond their home region. For many, the merchant of record (MoR) model provides a shortcut through the bureaucratic hurdles that typically accompany international growth. The MoR serves as the legal entity responsible for every transaction, allowing your team to focus on the product experience while the MoR handles the heavy lifting of global commerce.

• Immediate Market Entry: An MoR eliminates the need for APAC companies to establish local legal entities in the U.S. or Europe, enabling global expansion in days rather than months. Entity setup is not just a one-time cost — it creates ongoing legal, financial, and operational overhead.
• Compliance Outsourcing: The MoR handles the calculation, collection, and remittance of sales taxes and VAT, and it assumes the risk for fraud and chargebacks. And while taxes are very important, this is also critical  for companies using traditional PSPs, because it is just one part of a much bigger operational burden.

2. Meet Digital Goods Regulations in Europe

Europe has moved aggressively to standardize the digital economy, introducing frameworks that require absolute precision in data handling and tax reporting. Navigating these rules requires a proactive approach to ensure your checkout process remains both compliant and conversion-friendly. 

The following recent and ongoing mandates represent a hard line for international sellers, where universal requirements have replaced previous exemptions for smaller companies. 

• VAT in the Digital Age (ViDA): As of Jan. 1, 2025, previous VAT registration thresholds have been eliminated. Every B2C digital sale, no matter how small, is now a taxable event that must be reported through the One Stop Shop (OSS) system.
• The EU Data Act: Starting in September 2025, European customers have a “cancel anytime” right for cloud services, allowing them to terminate contracts with two months’ notice regardless of legacy terms. Providers must also ensure data portability, and by early 2027, all “switching fees” will be prohibited.
• Privacy as a Trust Factor: Beyond legal mandates such as GDPR, 2026 marks a shift toward “Privacy by Design.” Western buyers increasingly treat data transparency as a competitive requirement, so showing clear, auditable trails for data residency and automated decision-making is no longer just a legal hurdle but a primary driver of customer trust.

3. Navigate US Tax and Subscription Enforcement

The United States market is currently defined by complex state and federal regulations. Success in the U.S. requires a keen eye on shifting state legislation and a commitment to clear, accessible user terms that protect your business from regulatory scrutiny. 

Balancing these local tax obligations with federal consumer protection rules is essential for any APAC brand looking to establish a long-term presence.

• The Nexus Maze: Many U.S. states now impose sales tax on digital downloads and SaaS. For example, starting July 1, 2025, Maryland enacted a 3% sales tax specifically on technology services.
• Subscription Transparency: The FTC continues to aggressively enforce subscription transparency under the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act (ROSCA). Companies must offer simple, accessible cancellation options and clear disclosures about auto-renewal terms or risk significant penalties.
• Data Minimization: In line with the FTC’s focus on consumer protection, Western brands are shifting toward “data minimization”: the practice of only collecting what is strictly necessary. For APAC companies accustomed to data-rich “super-app” models, adopting a lean data approach is essential to avoid the multi-million-dollar settlements that are common under U.S. state privacy laws such as California’s CCPA.

4. Bridge the Gap Between Design and UX

APAC and Western customers often operate on different visual logic. While many high-growth Asian interfaces thrive on information density (such as surfacing multiple options, promotions, and data points all at once to show value), Western users typically favor minimalism and progressive disclosure. In the U.S. and EU, consumers don’t view a cluttered UI as feature-rich; instead, they perceive it as overwhelming and even spammy.

Here are a few tips on how to design for these audiences as you expand your business:

• Design for Focus, Not Completeness: Western SaaS buyers prioritize speed and ease. They expect a clean, minimalist layout with a single, clear call-to-action (CTA). In Western markets, whitespace is a functional tool for guiding the eye; removing it can lead to higher bounce rates.
• The Trust of Transparency: While APAC buyers often build trust through multi-sensory engagement, Western buyers build trust through visual clarity. This includes clear typography, a subdued color palette (moving away from high-energy reds and golds), and a direct, step-by-step onboarding flow that reveals features only as needed.
• Actionable Adjustment: Audit your marketing site and product dashboard for visual noise. Shift from a high-density, all-in-one layout to a streamlined experience that highlights one specific outcome at a time. This reduces the mental effort required for a Western buyer to say “yes” to your product.

5. Optimize Payment Performance and Risk

Cross-border payment performance is a silent variable that can either accelerate your growth or quietly drain your revenue through high decline rates. Friction at the point of purchase is often the result of poorly localized payment methods, or of inadequate fraud management that flags legitimate international buyers. 

For APAC companies, the most significant hurdle is often infrastructure: transitioning from a region where digital wallets and real-time payments are the primary engine of commerce to Western markets that remain deeply rooted in one-click payment systems.

• Local Optimization: Adding local payment methods (such as iDEAL in the Netherlands) can increase checkout conversion rates by up to 30%. Successful brands use dynamic checkouts that automatically detect a user’s location to display relevant currencies and billing frequencies.
• Managing Risk: Fraud and risk are harder to manage internationally. For example, while India’s UPI transactions are generally irreversible, Western credit cards offer robust consumer protections that make disputes easy. Utilizing an MoR can help mitigate this by assuming the legal and financial risk for fraud and chargebacks, protecting your bottom line from the volatility of international payment disputes.

6. Implement Advanced Pricing Strategies

Simply converting your home-market pricing into USD or EUR is rarely a winning strategy. To truly capture the market, APAC brands must adopt sophisticated pricing models that reflect the actual purchasing power and billing expectations of Western customers. These adjustments aren’t just cosmetic — they’re data-backed methods for increasing the lifetime value of every user you acquire.

• Purchasing Power Parity (PPP): Universal pricing often fails. SaaS companies that implement PPP-adjusted pricing — reflecting local economic conditions — see up to 18% higher growth rates and 25% higher revenue per customer.
• Annual vs. Monthly Billing: While monthly retention in Asia often hovers around 75% compared to 85%+ in the West, annual subscription retention is nearly identical globally. Understanding how customers like to buy (e.g., promoting annual plans) can help stabilize revenue and offset higher Western acquisition costs.

Scale Efficiently With FastSpring

Global expansion can get expensive quickly when each new market adds more internal complexity. FastSpring handles the global checkout, tax management, and regulatory compliance so you can focus on building your SaaS or software business rather than managing administrative overhead.

Ready to scale your SaaS beyond borders? Schedule a demo today.

The post 6 Proven Strategies for APAC Companies to Successfully Enter Western Markets appeared first on FastSpring.

Yet, there is conversation in the market that enterprise SaaS growth is beginning to slow. Finding new ways to grow can be especially hard for large companies that already have many subscribers, or which are chasing growth through new subscription services in addition to their usual offerings. 

The big question remains: How do you overcome the complex financial and technical hurdles of doing business globally? 

Spoiler alert: Global enterprise growth has an “easy button” with a merchant of record. Let’s take a look at how this powerful payment platform model solves enterprise-grade headaches.

FastSpring is how Enterprise game companies sell online in more places around the world. We handle every payment need — from subscription management to tax collection, remittance, and more — so your business can go farther, faster. We’re also the leading merchant of record for global software companies, powering over a billion dollars in worldwide transactions every year. We’ll manage your checkout, VAT and sales taxes, compliance, and more, freeing you to focus on what you do best: building great software. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

Enterprise Global Expansion = High Stakes, Higher Friction

Enterprise leaders currently face three primary challenges that prevent them from capturing international market share:

1. High Investment and High Risk in Emerging Markets: You know the opportunity is massive, but the investment required to build local entities, hire tax experts, and establish banking relationships is astronomically high. While North America remains the largest market, Asia-Pacific is now the fastest-growing region globally, with a 24.6% CAGR in virtual fitness as an example. Effectively capturing new users in this space requires native options for buyers or local entities, but the risk of getting it wrong in a regulated market often stalls expansion plans before they begin.
2. The Architecture Gap: You need an enterprise-grade payment architecture that is resilient, localized, and compliant. However, correctly building all of that takes significant time, money, and specialized experience. Most organizations try to solve this with a domestic-only infrastructure, resulting in the “entity gap”: a state in which your regional web traffic is ready to buy, but sales can’t proceed because you don’t support local payment methods or don’t have local entities, leading to high cross-border decline rates.
3. The Need for Flexibility: You want the ability to adjust your rollout based on real-time data without incurring unexpected costs or risk. Traditionally, capturing 100% of market potential in regions such as India, Brazil, or Indonesia has required permanent local subsidiaries, which take years to establish. But you need the flexibility to test markets without being locked into analog-era banking setups that make it difficult to pivot.

These challenges can make it exceedingly complex or slow to expand into new global markets, even for well-established enterprise SaaS companies.

So What Is a Merchant of Record (MoR)?

Simply put, a merchant of record is a service provider that acts as your software’s reseller. While you maintain the brand experience and customer relationship, the MoR assumes the majority of the liability for the transaction.

The MoR model allows a company to “go live tomorrow.” Because the MoR already holds local entities and tax registrations across 200+ regions, you can leverage its infrastructure as your own. This is the strategic solution to the entity gap. For global enterprises, the barrier to international revenue is rarely a lack of demand — it’s the infrastructure.

Why Do Traditional Payment Providers Fail at Scale?

Most enterprises start with a standard payment service provider (PSP) such as Stripe, PayPal, or Square. However, as you expand into multiple regions (some with complex tax rules and regulations), the limitations of a PSP create a revenue ceiling:

• Missed Opportunities: It’s common for global leaders to see significant web traffic from regions like India or Mexico, only to find they can’t process a single transaction because they lack a local legal entity. One FastSpring customer was losing 20% of web traffic in India before implementing an MoR that accepted local payment methods, which are otherwise inaccessible without a local entity.
• Unnecessary Discounts: When internal infrastructure can’t support global growth, teams look for scrappy, alternative growth tactics that provide a quick revenue boost but which don’t maintain profit margins over the long term. A merchant of record provides a sustainable alternative to this by making it easy to unlock untapped revenue in new territories rather than slashing prices in existing markets.
• Administrative Burden: When your expansion plans reach your tax and legal departments, they’re often vetoed due to the complexity of managing local taxes and varying economic nexus laws (nexus is the defined threshold for tax liability on sales). 
• Tax Law Fragmentation: Beyond tax calculation, enterprises struggle with data fragmentation. A fragmented payment setup creates a reconciliation nightmare, where transaction data lives in silos. A robust MoR provides a single source of truth, ensuring that every transaction — regardless of currency or country — carries a consistent data schema that meets global KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) standards.

How to Scale With Speed and Flexibility

Every large company fears the need to “rip and replace” an existing infrastructure, even if that means sticking with a solution that’s not meeting their needs. Modern MoR solutions such as FastSpring address this through something called “headless deployment.” Let’s look at an example.

Avid, a leader in creative software, needed a global online payments solution that would leverage its recent investment in a new composable commerce stack. By implementing FastSpring as its MoR, they didn’t have to abandon their existing proprietary subscription engines or dunning logic. Instead:

• Avid managed the customer experience, subscriptions, and dunning.
• They layered FastSpring on top to manage the back-end: global payments, tax collection, and compliance.
• They went live in just three weeks and saw 4% of transactions come in through newly added payment options such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, which supports long-term retention through buyer-friendly payment methods. 

This headless approach is critical for organizations using middleware platforms for orchestration and entitlements. Instead of a brittle, hard-coded integration, an enterprise-grade MoR uses webhooks and robust APIs to push real-time transaction data into your data lake or BI tools (like Snowflake or Tableau). This enables real-time revenue recognition, a necessity for both public companies and those preparing for an exit.

That’s how you scale without friction.

Even Your Back-Office Team Will Rejoice

Internal tax and finance teams are often the strongest skeptics regarding global expansion. An MoR turns these skeptics into advocates by providing:

• Liability Offloading: The MoR is responsible for calculating, collecting, and remitting all global taxes. If you get audited in Indonesia, the MoR handles it — not your internal team.
• One Report to Rule Them All: Instead of reconciling thousands of transactions across dozens of currencies and banks, your finance team receives a single, consolidated payment and a clean data set.
• ERP Integration: Leading MoR solutions such as FastSpring provide data that flows seamlessly into SAP Commerce, S/4HANA, and other enterprise backends, ensuring the cycles of planning, execution, and analysis are always data-driven and efficient.

This isn’t just about a CSV export — it’s about automated GL mapping. Leading MoR solutions allow you to map transaction types directly to your internal chart of accounts (COA). This turns a week-long, manual month-end close into an automated process, reducing human error and ensuring that your ERP sub-ledgers are always in sync with your actual cash flow.

Lessons From the Field: Navigating LATAM and APAC

Enterprise expansion often fails in these regions due to the infrastructure barrier. According to a Baymard study, businesses that enable regionally preferred payment methods see 21% higher growth rates than those that don’t.

Treating a Brazilian or Indian transaction as “cross-border” by routing it through a U.S. or EU bank is a recipe for involuntary churn. For a local bank, a foreign-processed transaction poses a security risk, leading to higher decline rates.

With an MoR as your local legal entity, the transaction stays “in-country.” This shift doesn’t just lower fees; it fundamentally stabilizes your leaky funnel by ensuring valid customers aren’t blocked by banking security flags.

Similarly, forcing a mobile-first economy into a credit-card-only checkout creates another barrier. While credit cards dominate the West, they are the exception in high-growth regions. 

In India for example, credit card penetration is under 5%, while UPI (Unified Payments Interface) accounts for over 75% of digital retail transactions. Similarly, in Brazil, Pix has surpassed 150 million users. It’s not necessarily about having more payment methods; it’s about having the right ones.

Bridging the Entity Gap for Global Growth

The transition from a domestic success story to a global enterprise powerhouse is no longer a matter of simply “turning on” new regions. For the modern SaaS leader, the merchant of record model is more than a compliance shortcut — it’s a strategic lever for revenue operations. It represents the end of the entity gap, allowing your organization to:

• Reclaim Lost Revenue: Stop losing 20% or more of your international traffic to avoidable cross-border declines.
• Decouple Growth from Headcount: Scale into 200+ countries without hiring a team of tax experts or managing dozens of local entities.
• Empower the Back Office: Transform your finance and tax departments by offloading the liability and complexity of global nexus and tax laws.

Global expansion in 2026 isn’t about being present in every market — it’s about being native to every market. By partnering with an MoR like FastSpring, you ensure that your infrastructure is as agile as your code.

The demand is there. The customers are ready. It’s time to close the gap.

You built the software. Let FastSpring build your global payments strategy.

FastSpring is how Enterprise companies sell online in more places around the world. We handle every payment need — from subscription management to tax collection, remittance, and more — so your business can go farther, faster. We’re also the leading merchant of record for global software companies, powering over a billion dollars in worldwide transactions every year. We’ll manage your checkout, VAT and sales taxes, compliance, and more, freeing you to focus on what you do best: building great software.

Ready to try FastSpring? Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

The post Headache-Free Global Growth: The Enterprise Guide to Merchant of Record appeared first on FastSpring.

If you haven’t seen this prompt on your screen, you may have been living under a rock for the past two years. For everyone else, this is the instantly recognizable greeting from OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

It goes without saying that AI is more than just hype or a passing phase. In fact, it has permanently altered the way we work, shop, write, research, and even think. The global AI market is projected to swell from over $638 billion in 2024 to $3.68 trillion by 2034, and with 71% of organizations now using generative AI, global expansion isn’t just an opportunity — it’s a necessity.

So, what can high-growth AI companies do to break into these markets effectively while remaining compliant with local, rapidly changing legislation?

Luckily, FastSpring has the answer.

These companies need a strategy to navigate the complex global tax, payments, and compliance landscape. As your SaaS, API, or token-based service becomes accessible worldwide, your team is suddenly liable for a tangled web of complex regulations.

This is where most AI startups get stuck. They are forced to divert precious engineering resources to build and maintain a global billing and tax compliance machine. For this reason, they often deploy a basic Stripe implementation; however, time and again, companies realize that Stripe costs more and doesn’t account for all the challenges and complexity that come with a global sales strategy.

Instead, partnering with a full-stack merchant of record (MoR) such as FastSpring removes the operational burden of payments, taxes, and subscriptions, so you can focus on enhancing your product and increasing market share.

Global Compliance Is Not One Size Fits All

While your team is focused on training models rules, a different set of rules is coming for your company as you expand globally: tax and regulatory compliance. And for AI companies, this challenge is even more acute than it is for traditional SaaS.

Take global sales tax for example. This is the most immediate and costly challenge. If you sell digital services to a customer in the European Union, you are required to collect VAT at the buyer’s local rate (which, at the time of writing, varies from 17% to 27%) and then file those collected taxes with the correct authorities.

The shift away from simple compliance isn’t unique to the EU. In the United States, the rules are even more fragmented. Sales tax rules for digital services vary by state. Some states, such as Colorado, even allow individual counties and cities to set their own tax rates, resulting in thousands of potential tax jurisdictions. Each one requires a separate filing.

Failing to manage this tax complexity not only risks fines but also compromises your ability to operate.

Beyond taxes, your checkout itself becomes a barrier:

• Localized Payments: Credit cards are not king everywhere. In the Netherlands, customers prefer iDEAL. In Brazil, it’s PIX. Failing to offer these payment methods risks a high cart abandonment rate.
• Localized Currencies: 76% of shoppers prefer sites that display pricing in their home currency. Failing to do so kills conversion.
• Data Governance: You will be responsible for processing payment data securely in accordance with regional requirements, such as PCI compliance.

Why AI Is Different

In the payments world, AI is increasingly being treated as a high-risk category. The AI industry, especially B2C tools, is far more prone to high chargeback rates. A user might dispute a charge because they “didn’t like” the quality of the generated text or art, claiming it wasn’t what they were promised.

This means AI companies don’t just need a payment solution — they need a sophisticated partner with intelligent models to manage this new and specific type of risk. 

When an AI company partners with a trusted merchant of record such as FastSpring, it gains a crucial advantage. FastSpring maintains dedicated, advanced risk models that actively prevent unwarranted chargebacks. More importantly, partnering with an established MoR provides immediate payment credibility with banks and acquirers.

This credibility translates directly to better approval rates.

The reason is twofold: First, you gain a known, respected partner advocating on your behalf; second, the millions of successful transactions flowing through FastSpring’s trusted network signal to banks that they are processing on behalf of a reliable entity. Ultimately, higher approval rates mean less lost revenue and more profit in your pocket.

How FastSpring Solves for AI Scaling

At FastSpring, we know that seamless compliance and checkout transactions drive conversion and revenue. As your merchant of record, FastSpring becomes the legal seller of your product. The moment a customer clicks “Buy,” they are purchasing from us.

Our goal is simple: to give you the compliance and payment infrastructure that generates meaningful revenue so that you can focus on your code.

• Comprehensive Product and Entitlement Management: FastSpring provides robust in-app tools to manage your entire product catalog, including subscriptions, coupons, and promotional offers. We go further by integrating directly with your backend systems; this ensures that your internal usage monitoring doesn’t just track costs — it actively informs subscription status, controlling product access and feature availability automatically.
• Complete, Offloaded Tax and Compliance: You don’t need to register for VAT in Spain, calculate sales tax in rural Colorado, or remit payments to the Japanese government. FastSpring does all that. We are responsible for calculating, collecting, and filing all global sales taxes and VAT.
• Global Payment Localization: Our platform comes pre-integrated with international payment methods and major currencies. We automatically detect the user’s location and offer them the currencies and payment types they trust, including iDEAL, Pix, UPI, Kakao Pay, and more.
• Intelligent Fraud Prevention and Risk Management: Because FastSpring processes billions of dollars in secure traffic, our reputation with banks can help drive higher authorization rates. Our intelligent fraud models are tuned to identify and block bad actors, reducing your chargebacks and mitigating the cross-border payment risk that is unique to the AI industry.
• Flexible Billing for AI Models: FastSpring provides robust tools to facilitate sophisticated subscription management, perfectly suited for metered and usage-based AI services. For example, with FastSpring’s Managed Subscriptions, your system retains control over billing logic. Your platform monitors customer usage (tokens used, compute time, API calls, etc.) and then leverages our API to dynamically set the price and trigger the charge. This seamless integration allows you to bill variable, usage-based amounts on your own schedule — while offloading all the underlying payment and compliance complexity to us.
• Full-Service Payment Support: If a customer has a problem with a payment, our global support team handles it, not yours.

To learn more about HomeDesigns AI or see their FastSpring checkout, visit their website.

Go Global With FastSpring

Expanding into new markets doesn’t have to be complex. Your company’s core mission is to build groundbreaking AI, not to become an expert in EU VAT returns.

With FastSpring’s Merchant of Record platform, you get a partner that handles the entire complexity of global commerce. You can tap into high-growth economies, reduce cart abandonment, and increase revenue, all while dedicating 100% of your resources to building the future of AI. 

Book a demo today to see how our AI-specific solution protects your revenue and empowers sustainable growth.

The post Payment Solutions for AI Startups: How a Merchant of Record Solves Global Compliance appeared first on FastSpring.

We’re excited to announce that Steer Safe™ is available for Mobile Apps companies to enable app2web steering on iOS and Android where allowed. App2web steering is simply the act of sending users directly from in-app to a webpage where they can make a purchase.

Steer Safe™ lets you easily add purchase buttons or links directly in-app and securely pass user information, product information, and more to your FastSpring-powered checkout on the web. Then, it automatically returns the user to the app, all while delivering the fastest least-taps path possible.

Key Benefits of FastSpring’s Steer Safe™ Buttons and Links Approach

• Shortest path possible
  • Link directly to a web hosted checkout, or to a store page for the least taps path possible.
• Drop-in secure links or buttons for purchase
  • Add buy buttons or links that go to a FastSpring checkout, or your web store directly from in-app and securely pass encrypted user data, product data, and more.
• Increased conversion with automatic mobile-native payments
  • Steer Safe automatically detects your users’ device and defaults to Apple Pay on iOS or Google Pay on Android.
• Synced backends and trusted user transaction authorization
  • FastSpring webhooks notify your backend when a purchase is complete, so you can grant entitlements and update user records in real-time. These simple principles apply whether you’re using platforms like Adapty, RevenueCat, Firebase, or your own custom backend.
• Seamless app2web flows
  • Fully customizable checkout experiences ensure that your app’s brand remains consistent from in-app to the web. Plus, when a purchase is complete, users return directly to your app via deep links–never losing their place in the flow.
• Flexible deployment options: 
  • Deploy your checkout in the way that best fits your users’ preferred experience. We support Chrome Browser and Chrome Custom Tabs on Android and Safari Browser and Safari Web Controller on IOS.
• Customizable checkout options: 
  • Customization options let you tailor checkout to your app’s branding. Choose between our traditional embedded checkout or the stacked layout to match your app’s design and paywall flows. Offer Google Pay, Apple Pay, and saved payment methods first for faster, easier purchases.

Why Steering With Steer Safe™ Matters

Steer Safe™ removes friction from the purchase process while giving you complete control of the user relationship—and user data. You deliver the experience, and FastSpring handles secure global payments, tax, and compliance.

No matter what backend you use, FastSpring makes app2web checkout simple, secure, and user-friendly.

How Steer Safe™ Works

For a step-by-step technical guide on how to enable an integration with FastSpring Steer Safe™ using React Native, or Unity if your app is a mobile game, check out our product documentation here. Or, schedule some time with our dedicated Solution Engineers who can help you understand how FastSpring can integrate with your app’s specific use cases.

Steer Safe™ is a backend agnostic approach and can be used to integrate with your backend of choice. In this post, we’ve built an app using React Native and have a middleware listener hosted on AWS to support entitlements, but you can use another development framework or backend system like Adapty, RevenueCat, Firebase or an in-house custom backend system.

Once integrated, you’ll use a signed checkout URL from your backend that includes the product and user ID via secure payload when a user taps the button or link in-app on your app’s paywall. Your app then opens the URL where FastSpring takes in your user information and securely initializes your app’s checkout or web store.

Depending on device, and style of checkout chosen, Steer Safe™ defaults will show Apple Pay, Google Pay, or a previously saved payment method at the top of the screen. Then, when the purchase is complete, FastSpring sends webhooks to your backend letting you know the subscription has been activated so you can grant entitlements, and the user is then seamlessly returned to your app via deep link.

In our example, the initial app landing page serves as the paywall, encouraging users to purchase a subscription. FastSpring webhooks then confirm the subscription status after checkout to unlock premium features. However, this implementation is flexible and can be adapted to suit your app’s unique strategy.

Why Use Steer Safe™ by FastSpring?

• Save money on marketplace fees
• Get better renewal rates than app store subscriptions
• Gain access to user data that’s inaccessible with marketplace only listings
• Drive user acquisition and retention with bespoke web stores or direct checkout

Steer Safe™ by FastSpring gives you a simple, secure way to steer users from in-app to a web checkout and back again. It keeps sensitive data protected, defaults your users to their most trusted payment methods, and then returns them back to your app seamlessly in seconds. 

The result is a faster path to steering users from in-app, less user dropoff during checkout, and more revenue for your business. Want to learn more? Visit fastspring.com/apps or schedule some time with our Solution Engineers.

The post FastSpring Releases Steer Safe™ for Mobile Apps on iOS and Android 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.

This year, Audio Developer Conference is also bringing back ADC Workshops as part of the main schedule, available to both in-person and online participants. Taking place on the first day of the event (Nov. 10), workshops will run alongside a full program of 18-minute talks. Spots for workshops are limited and require registration, so participation will be on a first-come, first-served basis. It’s the perfect opportunity for developers, educators, and students around the world to learn, connect, and exchange ideas in real time.

Where to Get Tickets

Still need tickets? Head over to the registration page to grab your ticket today.

How to Connect With FastSpring

You can connect with FastSpring at our virtual booth during Audio Developer Conference through the Gather platform. Simply navigate to the exhibitor area, find the FastSpring booth, and drop in to chat with our team. We’ll be online to answer questions, share insights, and help you explore how FastSpring can help you grow and monetize your audio software.

Already know that you want to meet with a FastSpring expert during the event? Schedule a demo today.

FastSpring is the leading merchant of record for global SaaS and software companies — powering over a billion dollars in worldwide transactions every year. We’ll manage your checkout, VAT and sales taxes, compliance, and more, freeing you to focus on what you do best: building great audio software. Founded in 2005, FastSpring is a privately owned company headquartered in the U.S., with offices in the Netherlands, Singapore, Canada, the U.K., and Ireland. For more information, please visit https://www.fastspring.com.

The post FastSpring Sponsoring ADC Bristol 2025 appeared first on FastSpring.

And as our annual SaaS and software benchmarking data report has shown across the last few years, the shopping spike doesn’t just apply to physical goods like clothing, jewelry, toys, or electronics. 

End-of-year budget spending certainly contributes to this effect too.

Is your SaaS or software business ready to take advantage of the B2B and B2C spending sprees? 

FastSpring is a merchant of record for over 3500 companies that use our platform daily. By analyzing years’ worth of aggregate sales data, we have helpful insights to share about Q4 sales spikes for software and SaaS businesses.

Below, we share this year’s insights into:

• The latest U.S. trends in year-end SaaS and software sales data.
• The latest global trends in year-end SaaS and software sales data.
• How FastSpring can help you best capitalize on Q4 sales spikes.

FastSpring is a merchant of record that can help you easily grow your business internationally. We provide an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video game, and other digital product businesses, including VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, and award-winning consumer support. Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

Our Data Sources and Analysis Methodology

Where the Data Are From

FastSpring helps companies sell digital products in over 200 countries, but to help us keep this study consistent and repeatable, we’ve pulled sales data from eight countries around the world. 

Each year, we include the U.S., Canada, Germany, Great Britain, India, Brazil, Australia, and China.

This data are specific to where the sales took place, not where the companies are located.

To show a glimpse into one specific country that’s also a large, often-targeted SaaS and software market, we also show the same trends for just the United States.

When the Data Are From

To highlight useful trend data while avoiding any major outliers skewing the data, we use aggregated data for the most current five calendar years. The data below represent sales across 2020-2024.

We also use a seasonal index to show quarterly or monthly sales against a year’s monthly or quarterly average (read more about that in the How section below).

What We Measured

FastSpring supports the sales of a vast array of digital products, including SaaS, software, video games, mobile apps, AI, and eLearning. 

To narrow this report to a specific type of industry, we’ve excluded everything but software and SaaS.

We also used U.S. dollars as the currency for all figures to make comparison easy and clear. 

How We Measured It

To establish a baseline, we calculated monthly and quarterly averages for each year. 

For a very simplified example, if four quarterly totals were $200, $200, $100, and $300, the quarterly average for the year would be $200. 

Then once we had the period average for the year, we compared each period’s actuals to that period average to get a percentage.

So for example, if Q3 shows a percentage of 90%, it means the sales total that quarter was 10% lower than the year’s quarterly average. If Q4 shows a percentage of 111%, that means Q4 sales totals were 11% higher than the year’s quarterly average. 

We then combined that data across five years to get the five year averages and avoid any outliers causing a sharp spike that might have skewed the results too much. 

US Year-End Trends for SaaS and Software Purchases

The following data show the monthly and yearly averages for U.S. software and SaaS sales across the last five years.

5YR Average US SaaS and Software Sales by Month

In the U.S., the three highest monthly spikes of SaaS and software sales are in March (104%), December (105%), and as expected, November (112%).

5YR Average US SaaS and Software Sales by Quarter

Similarly, Q4 is the highest-performing quarter for software and SaaS sales at 106%, with Q1 at 99%, Q2 at 97%, and Q3 at 98%.

Global Year-End Trends for SaaS and Software Purchases

Global trends show even stronger spikes in November and Q4, thanks to particularly strong sales in China and Germany (more on that below). 

5YR Average Global SaaS and Software Sales by Month

Just like in the U.S., global sales of software and SaaS spiked slightly to 104% in March and 105% in December. 

But as expected, the spike in November was higher than just in the U.S., at 118% globally.

While Black Friday and Cyber Week have traditionally been anchored to the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., seasonal sales surges have caught on worldwide, perhaps thanks to other countries such as Germany observing Black Friday and Cyber Monday (or even an entire Cyber Week), and China observing Singles Day on November 11 (11.11). 

5YR Average Global SaaS and Software Sales by Quarter

Quarterly sales reflect a slightly smaller spike over the shopping holiday season when Oct.-Nov.-Dec. are averaged together, but the spike is still significant at 8%.

Because the quarterly spike isn’t as high as the single spike in November, it reinforces that software and SaaS companies should focus their marketing and sales efforts specifically in November to get the best return and see the most growth. 

5YR Average SaaS and Software Sales by Month per Country

To illustrate the changes in various countries (and give you an idea of which countries may be most worth targeting), we’ve also broken out the monthly data by country for the eight countries we included in this survey. 

Here’s what monthly software and SaaS sales fluctuations look like with five years of data for the United States (US), Canada (CA), Germany (DE), Great Britain (GB), India (IN), Brazil (BR), Australia (AU), and China (CN).

We mentioned the China and Germany shopping holidays in November above, but China also sees spikes in April and June, likely due to the 418 (April 18) and 618 (June 18) shopping holidays.

Regardless of other monthly spikes throughout the year, November is still the single highest spike for any of the eight countries we included — ranging from 112% in the U.S. and 117% in India on the low end, to 148% in Germany and 149% in China on the high end.

SaaS and software companies can capitalize on this trend with:

• Email promotions.
• Custom partner coupon codes (which they can help you promote).
• Social media campaigns.
• Upsell or bundle offers.
• Localized promotions that would especially appeal to customers in each of your targeted regions.
• A merchant of record partner for online payments that can help you easily sell your software or SaaS worldwide.

How FastSpring Can Help

Software companies that already use FastSpring know why we’re a trusted partner in the global payments space. (Check out what Avid and Stardock have to say about the great experiences they’ve had with FastSpring, or find more FastSpring customer stories here.)

But if you’re new to FastSpring (or to the merchant of record model), here are some of the reasons our customers love using FastSpring to sell their software around the world.

FastSpring Makes Global Payments Easy for You and Your Customers

Payments Localization

Making your product available for purchase in more countries is only part of taking a software business global. 

You also have to make it very easy for users to make the purchase, with the least hesitation possible.

That requires presenting a localized checkout experience — including automatic conversions to local languages and currencies, offering dozens of the most popular payment methods (which vary by region), intelligent payment routing to regional payment gateways (to help reduce failed payments), and more.

To support improved payment localization, we work closely with our customers and payment partners to understand which payment methods are the most valuable in different regions and industries across the globe. 

This has materialized in the release of UPI in India and Pix in Brazil throughout 2025. 

By the end of October 2025, we plan to improve our Pix capabilities with support for recurring payments on subscription purchases. We’re also excited to add Toss payments in South Korea, providing additional support beyond Kakao Pay in the region.

Custom Discounts, Offers, and Coupons

When you’re running campaigns for Cyber Weekend or other regional holidays, you’ll need a partner who can support customizable offers and coupons. 

This includes the ability to:

• Offer percentage discounts on individual items.
• Preapply coupons via custom links.
• Stack multiple coupons.

FastSpring already supports all of those today, but now, we’re adding the ability to apply discounts at the order level to add even more flexibility on promotional planning. Instead of offering discounts on a per-item basis, you can now apply the discount to the entire order — which translates into clearer promotions for your customers, and ultimately, more completed orders. This feature is set to launch by the end of October, with plenty of time for Cyber Weekend prep.

Robust At-a-Glance Reporting

Once you’ve launched your Cyber Weekend campaigns, you’ll need to monitor their success throughout the course of the promotional holidays. 

With FastSpring, you get access to our Welcome Dashboard, which provides an instant view of the health of your business and campaigns. This dashboard shows key metrics such as net sales, orders, subscriptions, and chargebacks — without the need for extra navigation. That makes it easy to understand at a glance how your campaigns are performing.

If you need to dig deeper, you can simply click into an individual dashboard to dig into more specifics around individual products, chargeback rates, churn rates, and even revenue recognition for the future.

With the wide variety of reports available, you won’t have to wonder how your campaigns are performing. Instead, you can glean clear insights into your campaign’s successes or make tweaks to your campaigns if something is trending in the wrong direction.

FastSpring has localized payments, flexible discounts, and visual reporting covered. Learn more about FastSpring’s global payments.

FastSpring Calculates, Collects, and Remits Global Taxes so You Don’t Have To

FastSpring doesn’t just facilitate payments — we’re a merchant of record, which means we become the entity actually selling the digital products.

That also means that we’re the ones who handle sales taxes and VAT. 

FastSpring’s team of experts stays current on global tax regulations so we can calculate, collect, and remit those taxes — so you don’t need to worry about it. 

Learn more about FastSpring’s global tax management. 

FastSpring Has World-Class Support for You and Your Users

FastSpring’s award-winning support team is standing by and ready to help both the companies that use FastSpring as their merchant of record, and the customers who purchase software, SaaS, and other digital products.

For consumer support, customers can submit an online request and get personalized assistance. FastSpring also provides a helpful list of support topics for consumers to browse, including Licenses and Downloads, Checkout and Purchasing, and more.

For software companies using FastSpring as their MoR, you can submit a request from within the FastSpring app, or simply visit our support page.

Read more about our Stevie® award for Front-Line Customer Service Team, our Globee® award for Customer Excellence in the “Achievement in Team Customer Success” category, or submit a seller or consumer support request.

Partner With FastSpring

For over 20 years, FastSpring has been a trusted payment provider that can help you easily grow your business internationally. As a merchant of record, we provide an all-in-one payment platform that includes VAT and sales tax management, payment localization, award-winning consumer support, and more — making us an excellent partner for SaaS, software, video games, mobile apps, AI, eLearning, and other digital goods businesses. 

Set up a demo or try it out for yourself.

The post Cyber Weekend Benchmarking Data: 2025 SaaS and Software Holiday Spend Report appeared first on FastSpring.

For digital-first businesses, the easiest way to manage all aspects of billing is to choose a solution that acts as your merchant of record (MoR). A billing solution that acts as your MoR gives you access to multiple payment processors (which lets you accept more payment methods and is useful when accepting payments globally, as we explain below) while taking on the liability of all transactions for you. An MoR also takes the lead on chargebacks, fraud prevention, tax audits, legal compliance, and more.

When selling physical goods and services (online or in person), various Stripe alternatives built for physical goods payments (such as Amazon Pay, Square, etc.) can provide payment processing, order fulfillment, financing options, and more. (It’s worth noting that most of these solutions can also be used by SaaS, software, video game, and other digital goods companies; however, none of them is a complete payment solution.)

In this guide, we compare eight of the best Stripe alternatives in each of these categories. Since our expertise is in providing MoR services to digital-first companies, we’ll start with an in-depth review of our solution, FastSpring.

Table of Contents

• MoRs for digital goods companies:
  • FastSpring: International payment solution for SaaS, software, video game, mobile app, AI, eLearning, and other digital product businesses.
  • Paddle: Payment infrastructure platform.
  • Verifone: Formerly 2Checkout.
• Billing software for selling physical goods and services:
  • Square: Popular payment platform for startups.
  • PayPal for Business: Available on major ecommerce platforms.
  • Authorize.net: For merchants and small businesses.
  • Adyen: Robust financial technology platform.
  • Amazon: Payment service and order fulfillment.

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

If you’re looking for a Stripe alternative to help you grow your business internationally, we can help. FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video games, mobile apps, and other 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.

All-In-One Payment Solutions (MoRs) for Digital-First Businesses

Most companies using Stripe (or something similar to Stripe) know it’s more than just a payment processing platform — but that there are challenges to making the system work for a global SaaS company. It can require tons of add-ons, a complicated pricing structure, and additional fees — and still lack or limit some key features.

For example, Stripe advertises subscription management features as part of the Stripe Billing package; however, many companies end up integrating with another service like Chargebee or Recurly to get the subscription management features and ease of use they need.

Often, digital goods businesses end up with a payment tech stack of over a dozen tools for:

• Calculating and remitting international taxes.
• Accessing additional subscription management features.
• Covering fraud protection.
• Handling chargebacks.
• Implementing a checkout.
• Getting higher authorization rates in other countries.
• And more.

Making it all work together puts a massive strain on the development team.

Plus, you’ll need to maintain a large team of tax and legal experts to stay up to date on regional regulations and maintain global compliance (because solutions like Stripe don’t usually help with legalities). For example, while it’s true that historically, SaaS and ecommerce companies haven’t always needed to pay VAT or sales tax, that’s no longer the case. If you don’t collect and remit the right amount of tax in each jurisdiction where you sell, you could face hefty fines — or even be banned from selling in that region in the future.

Choosing a payment processing solution that also acts as your MoR solves all these problems. 

A merchant of record (MoR) takes care of the entire digital goods billing process for you, including collecting and remitting local and international taxes (such as VAT and local sales tax), staying compliant with local laws and regulations, online payment processing, chargebacks, and much more.

FastSpring Is an International Payment Solution

FastSpring has been acting as an MoR for global software and video game companies for over 20 years, so we know what it takes to expand globally almost overnight. Here are some examples of how FastSpring helped other SaaS and software companies expand globally and increase revenue:

• Mailbird achieved over 100% growth by switching to FastSpring. They previously experimented with platforms like Stripe and PayPal. 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 offered them localized checkout experiences that automatically display accurate pricing, language, currency, and taxes around the world. Plus, it was clear that FastSpring is an invested partner with the scalability to grow with their business needs as Capture One expanded their global reach. Read the Capture One case study here.
• SocialBee doubled its monthly recurring revenue and managed tax compliance by switching from Braintree to FastSpring. Read the SocialBee case study here.

Next, we’ll take a deep dive into a few of FastSpring’s billing solutions. 

Note: The following solutions are also offered to digital-first businesses selling downloadable software, video games, app subscriptions, and other digital products. 

Leverage Multiple Payment Processors to Increase Revenue

Many digital-first companies and founding teams initially think they just need one payment processor to accept payments. However, most of those companies eventually end up needing more in order to:

• Accept more payment methods: Customers are more likely to complete a purchase if they can use their preferred payment method. However, not every payment processor supports the same list of payment methods. Working with multiple payment processors lets you accept more local payment methods and, therefore, increase revenue.
• Increase authorization rates for international transactions: Card networks are more likely to authorize transactions when the payment processor is in the same country as the buyer. Some payment processors will establish a legal entity in multiple locations; however, most companies still need to work with multiple payment processors in order to process all payments locally. 
• Accept payments from more countries: Some payment processors only support payments from select countries or regions. Working with multiple payment processors lets you reach customers in more locations.
• Minimize failed payments: Working with multiple payment processors can also solve connectivity issues or system failures. If one payment processor is experiencing a network failure, you can reroute the transaction to a payment processor that’s fully operational. 

With FastSpring, you’ll be supported by multiple payment processors that specialize in global transactions and accept the most common payment options around the world — including but not limited to Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH bank transfers, SEPA, Amazon Pay, Pix, AliPay, UPI, and more (with more added all the time).

Click here to see the full list of payment methods accepted by FastSpring.

FastSpring connects with multiple international payment gateways, and our platform uses intelligent payment routing to send each payment to the gateway with the highest authorization rates for that payment method and location. Then, if a transaction fails, we automatically retry the transaction using a secondary payment processor.

Related: Top 10 International Payment Gateways: An In-Depth Guide

Prevent Fraudulent Transactions Without Blocking Valid Transactions 

The right fraud protection can help you increase authorization rates, decrease chargebacks, and protect your company from attacks. However, if legitimate transactions get marked as fraud, you’ll lose revenue.

FastSpring takes the lead on fraud and risk activities by partnering with Sift for advanced risk analysis and fraud protection. Sift uses machine learning and AI to analyze millions of global transactions each month to identify risky transactions with higher accuracy. This means your fraud protection is constantly evolving to provide better security and improve approval rates.

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

Note: You also have the option to block transactions from certain regions or limit products in each region.

If one of your customers does initiate a chargeback, or there’s an issue with fraud, FastSpring takes the lead to resolve it for you.

Discover more and read FAQs about FastSpring’s GDPR and PCI compliance, how FastSpring helps protect against high-risk transactions, and more.

Avoid High Fines and Penalties by Letting FastSpring Handle Local Legal Compliance for You

Even if all legitimate transactions go through, you could face hefty fines or be prevented from transacting in that region if the transactions don’t comply with local laws and regulations. (For example, the Reserve Bank of India limits automatic recurring payments to ₹15,000 INR, or approximately US$170; transaction attempts above that amount simply won’t go through.) 

Most companies need a full compliance department of legal professionals to keep up to date with all the laws and regulations of each jurisdiction they do business in. 

You can also face fines or penalties if you don’t file consumption tax. SaaS companies didn’t always have to pay tax, but tax regulations for digital sales are changing and being increasingly enforced.

Companies that use Stripe (or another point solution) must handle tax on their own. While Stripe will help gather sales tax, you’ll need other software to collect VAT, GST, and other forms of consumption tax. Plus, you’ll need a staff of tax experts to remit the tax at the end of each tax period. 

FastSpring handles the whole process of calculating, collecting, and remitting global sales and consumption taxes for you by: 

• Collecting all consumption tax (including GST, VAT, SST, etc.) and remitting it at the appropriate times.
• Taking the lead on legal compliance (including audits).

FastSpring collects and files taxes in more than 55 countries, 13 provinces, and all 45 U.S. states with sales tax (the other five states don’t collect sales tax). We even handle tax-exempt transactions in the U.S. and B2B reverse charges (when and where allowed) internationally.

FastSpring is fully compliant with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Additionally, we renew our level one certification — which is the highest level possible — with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) every year. FastSpring also participates in the Data Privacy Framework (DPF) for international data transfers. Learn more at our Trust Center.

We build and maintain relationships worldwide with tax law specialists who keep us aware and up to date on laws and regulations as they change.

Manage Everything From Checkout to Subscriptions in One Platform

Instead of building and onboarding a payment stack of over a dozen different solutions to help you manage subscriptions, checkout experiences, reporting, analytics, and more, FastSpring lets companies streamline and manage all aspects of digital goods billing directly from their FastSpring dashboard. 

Below is a brief overview of these features. For a complete list of features (including digital invoicing and interactive quotes) visit FastSpring’s product overview page.

Custom, Localized, and Optimized Checkout Experience

FastSpring gives you full control over your checkout process with our Store Builder Library (SBL). You can customize your checkout, and our team will offer personalized customer support along the way.

We also offer three pre-built experiences. With minimal code, you can embed the FastSpring checkout into a web page or insert a pop-up checkout. Or, if you want to outsource the entire checkout process, you can choose the web storefront option to send customers to a secure web storefront managed entirely by FastSpring. You can also customize the storefront to match the visual branding of your website.

Whichever checkout experience you choose, FastSpring can automatically localize your checkout based on the customer’s location, including translation into 21+ languages and price conversion to many local currencies. You can also set your own language, currency, and price for each region or opt to let your customers choose for themselves.

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

Subscription Management

FastSpring lets you create a variety of custom trial and recurring billing models without writing a line of code. 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 FastSpring’s developer-friendly API and webhooks library to build more complex custom subscription logic and integrations.

If you want to see how FastSpring compares to Chargebee, read this article. 

Dunning Management

FastSpring handles all failed payments and customer notifications for you — simply choose how you want it handled, and we take care of the rest. Our platform offers flexible dunning management options, which include: 

• Proactive reminders when payment information needs updating. Automatically send flexible, custom email reminders to your customers before a debit or credit card expires. We offer a pre-made email template — or you can customize your own email and set it to send two, five, seven, 14, or 21 days after a payment failure.
• Automatically retry failed payments. FastSpring retries the original payment method multiple times, including before sending each reminder email.
• Flexible failed payment logic. Continue (or pause) service until the last notification has been sent out. Pause (or cancel) the service once all notifications have been sent out and the payment is still getting declined.

With FastSpring, your customers will also have an easy-to-access and intuitive self-serve Customer Account Portal where they can view their order history, update payment information, and manage their subscriptions. The portal is managed by FastSpring but matches the branding of your checkout for a cohesive customer experience.

Reporting and Analytics

While Stripe does offer revenue recognition tools for accounting purposes, many SaaS companies using Stripe end up adding a reporting and customer analytics tool to give them more insight into stats such as MRR, churn rate, new customers by product type or geography, and more. 

FastSpring’s Reporting and Analytics, on the other hand, is a robust suite built for digital products businesses. You can view key performance indicators (KPI) for your customer base and subscription models 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.
• 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.

Our platform features several dashboards, which include:

• Revenue Overview.
• Subscription Overview.
• Revenue Recognition.
• Chargeback Overview.
• Webhook Status.

If you don’t see exactly what you need, you can create and save your own custom reports. You can also reach out to our team for help finding or building the report you need. Export and share reports as a CSV, PNG, or XLSX file. 

For a complete list of features — including Digital Invoicing and Interactive Quotes — visit our website.

One Simple Pricing Model; All the Benefits

Most payment processors (like Stripe) typically charge a low processing fee; however, they’ll charge extra for features such as subscription management, additional payment method support, tax collection, and more. 

They’ll also usually pass along transaction fees such as network/scheme downgrade fees.

Plus, you’ll have to pay for any additional software needed for a complete billing solution — and the staff to manage the entire process. 

For most companies, what starts as seemingly low, flat-rate pricing ends up being an expensive route to take.

On the other hand, FastSpring manages your entire digital goods billing process for one flat rate. You’ll get access to our whole platform — including every feature and all services — in a single comprehensive package. 

Our team works with you to find an affordable monthly fee based on your transaction volume (and you’ll only be charged for successful transactions). Plus, you won’t need any additional software or headcount since we’re liable for transactions and take the lead on sales tax and VAT.

If you’re looking for a Stripe alternative to help you grow your business internationally, we can help. FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video games, mobile apps, and other 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.

Paddle: Payment Infrastructure Platform

Paddle is another Stripe alternative that acts as an MoR for SaaS and software companies. Paddle has features such as: 

• 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.

Verifone: Formerly 2Checkout

Verifone is a Stripe alternative that can act as your MoR or just as a payment service provider. This gives them the flexibility to support small- to medium-sized companies in different industries offering both in-person and online goods or services (e.g., retail and hospitality). 

Verifone functionalities include:

• Integrated point-of-sale (POS).
• Kiosks.
• Subscription management.
• Hosted checkout.
• Partner sales channel management.
• And more.

Some of these features are included with Verifone packages, while others are add-ons with their own additional fees.

With over 20 years of experience serving international software companies, FastSpring is one of the longest-standing MoRs for SaaS, software, video games, mobile apps, and other digital products companies. Use our expertise to help grow your business quickly. To learn more, sign up for a free account or request a demo today.

Stripe Alternative Billing Software for Selling Physical Goods and Services

While digital product companies can use almost any billing solution to sell their product (although some will be more effective than others), not every solution will be effective for companies selling physical goods or services. Companies selling physical goods and services need solutions that can manage both online and in-person transactions. 

When selling physical goods or services, most companies end up using two or more software solutions to build a complete billing solution. However, there are ways to minimize how many you need and how much it will cost you. The best place to start is to carefully consider your current needs (e.g., are you selling in person and online?) and plan for your future needs (e.g., are you a new business owner who might want to start selling online in the future?). 

Then, you can evaluate each billing solution by asking a few key questions: 

• How many aspects of billing does the software cover? Is each offering truly sufficient for your current needs (e.g., maybe they offer a subscription billing solution but don’t support the business model you need)? Do the features leave room for your company to grow?
• Does their pricing model allow you to get all features for one price, or will you have to pay extra for the features you need? Will the price be sustainably cost effective long term, as your company grows?
• Does the software offer seamless integration with other software you use?
• Is the software user friendly? 

Next, we cover five Stripe competitors for companies selling physical goods and services to help you get started with your search. 

Square: Popular Payment Platform for Startups

Square is a popular point-of-sale solution for companies of all sizes. With Square, you can accept payments from your online store, in-person, or via social media. Beyond payment processing, Square also offers solutions for: 

• Virtual terminals (so you can accept credit card payments using your computer).
• Business management.
• Customer engagement.
• Banking (including merchant accounts, savings accounts, and loans).
• Team management (including payroll, time off, etc.).
• And more.

PayPal for Business: Available on Major Ecommerce Platforms 

PayPal is a well-known digital wallet for personal online payments; however, they also offer payment processing for both online and brick-and-mortar businesses. PayPal supports debit card and credit card processing in store or from your online business.

(Digital-first businesses using FastSpring can also process payments using PayPal.)

PayPal for Business also includes: 

• QR code and POS systems.
• Donation tools.
• Built-in integrations with major ecommerce shopping carts (e.g., Shopify, WooCommerce, and more).
• Risk management and chargeback protection.
• Mass payouts.
• And more.

Note: PayPal also has a payments option called PayPal Enterprise Payments (formerly Braintree) that offers your own merchant account.

Authorize.net: For Merchants and Small Businesses

Authorize.net (a Visa solution) is a payment service provider that supports mobile payments, phone payments, and ACH. They also provide a card reader for in-person payments and support online purchases. 

Other features offered by Authorize.net include: 

• Simple checkout button.
• Recurring payments.
• Digital invoicing.
• Advanced fraud detection.
• Optional merchant account bundle.
• And more.

Adyen: Robust Financial Technology Platform

Adyen is an end-to-end solution for payment processing, data, and financial management. In addition to payment processing, Adyen offers features such as: 

• Virtual and physical card creation.
• Tools to optimize traffic in real time.
• Fraud detection.
• Automated dunning.
• Business bank accounts for your users.
• And more.

Amazon Pay: Payment Service and Order Fulfillment

Amazon Pay lets your customers use the payment information already stored in their Amazon account on your website. You can use Amazon Pay as a stand-alone payment solution without becoming an Amazon Marketplaces seller — or you can easily use Amazon Pay on your own website and become an Amazon merchant (which gives you the option for fulfillment by Amazon).

Amazon Pay includes: 

• Optimized checkout flow (modeled after Amazon’s own).
• Co-marketing campaigns.
• Self-service reporting dashboard.
• Fraud protection.
• Easy integration tools.
• And more.

Note: With FastSpring, your customers can pay using Amazon Pay and many other payment methods. 

Need a Stripe Alternative for Your SaaS, Software, Video Game, Mobile App, or Other Digital Product?

Let FastSpring help!

FastSpring lets you manage every aspect of global payments from one platform — without managing tons of different software solutions. We shoulder the liability for online transactions and take the lead on VAT and sales tax management, regulatory compliance across the globe, and much more for you. 

If you’re looking for a Stripe alternative to help you grow your business internationally, we can help. FastSpring provides an all-in-one payment platform for SaaS, software, video games, mobile apps, and other 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.

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

The post Stripe Alternatives for 2025: In-Depth Guide and 8 Options appeared first on FastSpring.

In this episode of Growth Stage, we speak with Hank Hoffmeier, email deliverability evangelist at Kickbox, about how authentication, verification, and deliverability impact your bottom line. Listen to learn:

• Why deliverability is no longer a “set it and forget it” process.
• How to fix common mistakes that are silently killing your campaigns.

Jump to video.  |  Jump to transcript.

Listen or watch now!

Podcast Full Interview: Audio

Listen online or find it on more podcast services.

Podcast Full Interview: Video

The post EP36: The Hidden Science of Email: Authentication, Deliverability, and Trust 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.