Stripe is buying a lucrative business, but more importantly it is buying the complex knowhow of running an international tax-compliant merchant of record. They can then integrate this into their product. I switched to LemonSqueezy primarily out of concern for EU-wide tax ramifications (EU strikes again). Is there a reason to choose LemonSqueezy over Stripe if you are located in the US? There hasn't been a single VAT-compliance case to my knowledge and the need for MoR is unclear.
Reduce the price to Stripe pricing + 1%, and this will be the default for everyone!
>Along the way, we received many acquisition offers and (Series A) term sheets from investors. But despite the allure of these opportunities, we knew that what we had built was truly special and needed the right partner to take it to the next level.
Wow. This is quite the smart and ballsy move. Congrats to the team. Looks like y'all knew what you were doing.
I found these surprising as I didn't see them mentioned on the pricing page near "Transaction fees ... 5% + 50¢" (https://www.lemonsqueezy.com/pricing).
From branding to the all UVP, it was a fast exit because it was meant to be.
Still a massive achievement
There's so little competition in the payments space, and this acquisition means that there's even less. I know LemonSqueezy already relied on Stripe, but before the acquisition, there was still a potential path for them to break that dependency.
I tried out LemonSqueezy a bit last year and had a mediocre experience, but it was at least nice to see a payment provider focused on simple, straightforward use cases. Stripe and Paddle have so many different customers and flows that it's hard to use them for simple, standard things. I was hoping to see LemonSqueezy fill that niche, but now Stripe is folding LemonSqueezy into the rest of their complex systems.
Now if only we could somehow get MoR for marketplaces...
That sounds somewhat promising but not entirely committed.
What’s the barrier to entry for starting up a similar business?
99% of SaaS won't reach the MRR needed to justify MoR
Of the 1% those breaking through 7 digit MRR can simply hire in house to manage tax remittance and not confuse their customers with invoices labelled with MoR's branding
All in all this seems like the fear campaign has worked beautifully for Paddle and Lemonsqueezy but some of us saw right through it and never really felt the need to pay 5%~11% (!!)
Looks like Stripe will shut down MoRs one by one