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Seeking advice on SaaS asset sale: Stripe & Chargebee vs Paddle
Hello everyone,
I'm currently preparing for the sale of a SaaS product and am evaluating different billing solutions to determine the best setup for a potential purchaser, particularly focusing on the ease of account transferability and the preferences of potential buyers. I am considering two options:
-
Stripe as a payment processor with Chargebee for subscription management: This option offers great flexibility and customization. However, I'm concerned about the complexity of transferring both a Stripe and a Chargebee account. Does anyone have experience with transferring ownership of these accounts? How straightforward is the process?
- Paddle as a turnkey solution: Paddle acts as a merchant of record and handles many of the compliance and administrative tasks. It seems like it might simplify the transfer process since it's a single-platform solution. Has anyone gone through the process of transferring a Paddle account? What should I be aware of?
I’m trying to determine which option would generally be more attractive to a potential buyer and which provides a smoother transition. If anyone here has gone through a similar SaaS asset transfer, could you share your experiences? Insights on dealing with Stripe or Paddle during such transitions would be especially helpful.
Thank you for your help, and I look forward to your insights!
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My 2c: Dealing with Chargebee support is awful. I chased them for months for some client work and got zero response. Based on that, I don't recommend them for anyone.
We've never had to transfer accounts, but also had our fair share of issues with Chargebee. For a bigger and complicated project (a marketplace with a mix of one-time and subscription payments with a variety of add-ons and German billing systems) they were willing to improve and change some of their APIs.
During the work with their dev team, we noticed multiple bugs in the APIs, pre-existing or freshly introduced ones, failure to notice API changes of third-parties they relied on and failure to deliver on-time and what was discussed.
The end result was APIs that 20 seconds to calculate prices, webhooks that took multiple minutes to arrive, changed behaviour of production APIs without publishing a new version and the shutdown of their Stripe bank transfer integration, since they realised they cannot support it any more.
After this experience, we decided, it would not be wise to be a long-term client of them.
The amount of frustration experienced and time lost because of them, probably doesn't fit in one post :)
Glad to see I'm not the only one!
I didn't mention that I couldn't even make any sense of their API docs in the first place!
What I was trying to get hold of them for was actually trying to make sense of the multiple differing doc pages for some of the subscription features. Nothing makes sense with them.
Chargebee tech & support sucks, that's indisputable. It was a nice product back in 2015 - now they raised lot of money, are trying to go upmarket and the usual shittification began.
So, for anyone following this post.
I've contacted Paddle support and the process is quite easy.
There are benefits to using Paddle over Stripe. When your potential buyers are not in the same jurisdiction, getting a new Stripe account and a painful migration process would be required for the new owner.
With Paddle, even if the buyer is from a different jurisdiction (but within their supported countries), there is a process of transferring the whole account.
You can also try Lemon Squeezy, but I think Paddle has a bit lower fees.
Thanks, I found LemonSqueezy fees greater than Paddle, and the product having more issues and bugs. Using it in a small project right now.
Hey Greg,
I sold a project last year and I was using Paddle to process payments.
The transfer was smooth, but keep in mind you'll need to transfer the ownership of your account, there's no way of transferring customers for another account for example.
Thankfully I was running a single project under this Paddle account. Otherwise it could've been an issue.
Thanks! This is basically what I needed to know.
I chose Paddle for obvious MoR (ease-of-use tax-wise) reasons, but their support is quite fast, which is another reason for me to recommend them.
Not having any transfer situation (yet), but positive they'll be a good choice based on stuff I see on the internet.