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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. :)


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 :)

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.
- 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.