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What sales checkout(s) do you use for your SaaS?
I realised different checkouts can be better suited for different stages of a SaaS app:
- Gumroad can be faster to collect preorders before even setting up a SaaS (I saw @draptis has done this nicely).
- Stripe has lower fees, but leaves the tax part up to you
- Then there's also the license key option which could be useful for life-time deals. I saw this available in new services like 🍋 Lemon Squeezy.
Overall , some payment gateways are easier/harder to set up than others. It's also worth considering services like Gumroad have their own marketplaces.
What are you using, and why do you choose it?
May it be worth using more than 1 service for a single app?
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Oliver Wolf
I'm playing around to use Gumroad to sell my desktop app. Super easy setup.
1. The user clicks a link in the app
2. Enters payment information
3. The user receives an license key from Gumroad by email
4. He pastes the license key into the desktop app
5. The app makes a request to the Gumroad API to validate the license key
6. Done
In case you are curious: https://gumroad.com/l/monsterwriter (its not published yet on Gumroad, but it seems like you do not have to. This link is available in the app. As soon the trial period expires the app will block and ask the user to go to this page for upgrading).
I mainly choose Gumroad because they care about the value added tax. Something that I could not find in the offering of Stripe. I also had a look at Paddle but from reading the docs, Gumroad seems to be much easier to use.
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@oliver_wolf ah i see, yeah it looks a good set up for a one time purchase or something like yearly access. I might try it for giving away lifetime access deals to make the tax easier..but for monthly subscriptions I think I'm still having to use Stripe 🤔
MonsterWriter is looking good, is there a landing page for it? Or do you just stick to gumroad?
@graeme_fulton Yes there is a landing page: https://www.monsterwriter.app/ .... Gumroad is only experimental right now. The only way to buy it right now is via Apple Mac App Store.
Nice question! From my experience so far:
- Gumroad is perfect for creators but it's limited to paywalling communities or info products. It's not a scalable platform for your SaaS product (and tbh I believe SaaS products is not their market).
- Stripe seem the best solution but it's tricky to set it up (even the Stripe Checkout). And the biggest problem is that you need an extra DB to handle users, permissions etc. Also you need to handle taxes.
Tbh I believe there is a huge gap in the market right now. A service that will offer an out-of-the-box payment & auth support. Sth like Stripe + Firebase. The use case would be to paywall simple app and disable features for free users.
https://www.outseta.com/ moves to right direction but I haven't checked their product yet.
@draptis Yeah I was just looking into 'Gumroad Ping' in comparison to Stripe webhooks..and couldn't find out anything about it. So i think you're right in that they seem better more for one-time purchase type products. Other than Stripe, Paddle looks decent for handling tax, but never tried that
Thanks for sharing outseta, will chekc that out too! Definitely there's a gap.. I'm trying Lemon Squeezy for a separate product, so hopefully they can crack it too