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Any horror stories about Lemon Squeezy?
Hey makers,
I'm thinking of using LS as the main payment provider. They have received my business details and everything looks good – i.e. I can use their features immediately. My question is: Is LS still reliable? I'd appreciate it if you could share your experience, good or bad.
Thanks in advance. :)
I'm thinking of using LS as the main payment provider. They have received my business details and everything looks good – i.e. I can use their features immediately. My question is: Is LS still reliable? I'd appreciate it if you could share your experience, good or bad.
Thanks in advance. :)
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the good:
- great for setting up simple checkout pages
- great for selling digital products (courses, books, etc)
- great for apps that need licenses (u dont need backend)
- nice design w/o effort
the bad:
- api/docs is confusing
- creating discounts is too complex for some reason
- people do not see the final price when they land on the checkout; could be problematic depending on your strategy
That's good to know, Alex :) Are you still using LS these days? I heard some people had problems with their payouts, but not sure either.
i only use LS in one of my products (
#ubidrop) for the license situation i mentioned.
for anything else I use stripe
Got it. Thanks Alex for sharing, appreciate it. :)
@rafal, want to share some?
Not personally, but I've been seeing horror stories about LS all over twitter. Completed payments get lost (no webhook, no transaction history), customer support disappearing for weeks, MMR charts being wrong, and more. I often wonder how they're still in business, but then again they are the most expensive in the MoR provider segment. 😅
Uh, that's tough. When was the last time you heard about such things? I wonder if it's still happening or if they have fixed it already.
Ha, thanks a bunch Dmytro for chiming in. :)
I just migrated my main project from Lemon Squeezy to Paddle… all I have to say in the topic :)
Ah, I tried Paddle but their verification process took too long. And they asked similar questions even though I’ve answered those already in the previous email :(
Using them for
#watchdog and other products. No issues accepting subscription and one-time payments. I don't use webhooks because with the amount of customers I have and the low churn rate, it's easier for me to just process subscription updates manually instead of building webhook logic.
Negatives:
- Some charts are confusing/wrong on their dashboard
- Their support is slow and about 50% of the time they don't respond or you need to follow up.
- Hidden fees. Make sure you use PayPal for payouts, otherwise you get dinged by extra charges. Also, there are extra charges for international and subscription payments that you might not expect.
- Checkout UI feels slightly worse/slightly less "professional" than Stripe's which I expect affects conversion rates in some way or another.
Overall it works and I have not had serious issues. Would I recommend them? Generally yes, but only if you care about the "merchant of record" functionality.
Recently: Stripe bought them and I'm hoping Stripe will just let all LS customers import their data directly to stripe, and roll the MoR features into Stripe Tax + licensing into some new "Stripe Licensing" product. That would be the most ideal scenario here as all the other LS features are duplicative of what Stripe already offers.
Ben, thank you for giving your thorough review. I guess I'll go for it. And yes, migrating to Stripe instantly is the ideal scenario. Let's see then...
No problem! Just to be clear, I wouldn't expect the migration to Stripe to happen instantly if at all.
Worst case, it's possible that Stripe could decide to let LemonSqueezy run as a separate product entirely and it's also possible that they won't allow you to create your own stripe account based on your LS data. That's just what I hope will happen.
My only complaint with them is zero to negligible support. There's no direct way to reach out to a 'human' support for any kind of help.
agreed, even though pinging jrfarr on x seems to work
There is, although the email is confusing: it's hello [at] lemonsqueezy.com
If you try support [at] lemonsqueezy.com the email will go through, but no one checks that inbox or it goes straight to /dev/null or something.
Also they respond inconsistently. As @alexstyl says if you don't get a response I've had good luck pinging jrfarr too, he seems to give a shit but not enough of a shit to fix their support process
@ben I've also tried that but like you mentioned, the support is very unpredictable. Also, @alexstyl, try @lmsqueezy handle as well. Once that worked out for me to get assistance.