That said, we've seen a big spike in signups over the past few weeks. If any HN readers have integrated recently and have feedback, we're always eager to hear it. Feel free to email me at patrick@stripe.com and I'll route to the right team(s).
As always, thank you to the many HNers who are also active Stripe users!
(There are hacky workarounds - but likely not worth the effort)
Then we read their legal terms, found about half a dozen obvious deal-breakers, and lost all interest.
1. reserves the right to unilaterally vary the contract in any way, with immediate effect and without actively notifying the merchant
2. ensures that if anything goes wrong, any legal action against it by its merchants would have to be taken in another country and under another legal system, even if Paddle operates in the merchant's own country
3. takes extensive control of the product or service they are selling on their merchant's behalf, to the extent that they can sell it to whoever they want, sell it at whatever price they want, give demos to whoever they want, etc.
4. requires that any software it is selling on behalf of its merchants be bug-free, and that the merchants accept liability for anything bad that happens if it isn't.
It's hard to take any service seriously when it has terms like that in its standard agreement. Unless these kinds of terms are unenforceable where you are (or where Paddle is, given the above?) and you have a legal opinion telling you so that you trust enough to bet your entire business on it, it seems like you'd have to be crazy to accept them.
I've seen some very one-sided terms from other payment services before, but I take them at their word that those terms are typically required by the giants behind the systems like the card networks and banking groups. I think some of those should be also be unenforceable by law, but right now that seems to be the price of admission. I've never seen anyone else seriously suggesting the kinds of terms that Paddle is, though.
Edit: Changed to present tense, after checking Paddle's legal terms of use at the time of writing at https://paddle.com/legal/ to confirm that these criticisms are still current. The first two points above are in the preamble at the start of the document. The third is under 4.2 and 6.1. The fourth is under 13.1(ii) and 13.2(ii).
Either way, thanks for the feedback!
To explain where we're coming from here, I personally learned a classic first-time entrepreneur lesson the hard way some years ago: if we're not a payments business then we should focus on what we are, not on payment mechanics.
The first time I started a B2C, I naively thought I could do better, and to be fair, I really did implement a simple, robust, flexible system that fit our needs well. But over time, even the better payment services started breaking APIs and neglecting documentation and dropping customer service standards and increasing prices, and maintaining those integrations became painful. Governments started changing their regulations and tax rules, and updating our systems to keep up with the ever-changing compliance and tax obligations become painful too. We also found that fraud and chargebacks weren't a significant problem for us, but surprisingly, churn due to unreliable card charges was unbelievably bad and could turn an otherwise healthy growth rate negative all on its own, which was not a good combination with the aforementioned drop in standards at the payment services.
What we're now looking for, in a nutshell, is a service to which we can outsource payment processing, subscription management, and all of the sales tax collection, reporting and remittance obligations. I don't want to use APIs or webhooks any more than I absolutely have to. I want to fill in correct, context-aware, all-inclusive prices on our pricing page with ideally one line of code. I want to hand our customers off smoothly to a well-designed, batteries-included sign-up flow with ideally one line of code. I want a simple notification to reach my server when a customer has paid us so we can have our systems respond accordingly, and I want simple notifications if anything has gone wrong so we can contact our customer or payment service and deal with it.
I do not want to know what the current sales tax rates are in Western Nowhere, Somecountry, and I certainly do not want to have to sign up for a government programme and file reports and remit taxes there because once upon a time we had one customer who signed up for one month and we collected 1.50 Nowheredollars in sales tax.
I do not want to have any UI on my site and therefore any code behind it for upgrading, downgrading, cancelling, refunding, retrying failed charges or sending flowers on my customer's birthday, except to the extent that we provide a simple way for a customer to indicate they want to do something and we can then hand off the mechanics to the payment service if we agree, again ideally with one line of code.
I do want a simple, effective dashboard facility on the payment service that lets me see and control all of those things (well, maybe not the flowers) and any other relevant settings if I want to, and I want it to be somebody else's problem to implement and maintain that facility.
I don't know what proportion of our revenues we'd be willing to give up for a service like that, but it would be far higher than anything we pay to any payment service today.
That might have been the intent, but I see nothing in the terms that restricts the scope of those I mentioned to that situation.
And the general "we can change anything we like and you can't easily sue us ever" would be inappropriate even in that situation.
I assume their legal teams have scoured through Paddle's terms of use
I respectfully suggest that this is an extremely dangerous assumption when you're talking about a binding legal agreement and the future of your business.
I've occasionally had a real lawyer look at the terms for some very popular online services that we were considering using, particularly when I thought they looked risky, and received formal advice along the lines of, "Run away. Don't walk. Run."