Lemon Squeezy vs Stripe
Both are finance tools. Here is what separates them.
| Lemon Squeezy | Stripe | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Finance | Finance |
| Pricing model | paid | paid |
| Price from | Paid | Paid |
| Upvotes | 16 | 6 |
| What it does | A merchant of record, so sales tax stops being your problem. | Payments, billing and invoicing with documentation people copy from. |
What Lemon Squeezy is
Lemon Squeezy is a hosted checkout and storefront for selling digital products, software licences and subscriptions. Its defining feature is that it acts as the merchant of record, meaning it takes on the liability for calculating, collecting and paying sales tax and VAT on the seller's behalf rather than leaving that to you. That service is paid for out of each sale. There is no monthly charge for the ecommerce features, and the headline rate is 5% plus 50 cents per transaction, calculated on the total order value and taken when the order is placed. The headline is seldom the whole cost, because surcharges are added on top of it. Transactions made outside the United States add 1.5%. PayPal transactions add a further 1.5%. Subscription payments add 0.5%. A subscription bought through PayPal by a customer outside the United States picks up all three, so the rate on that sale is 8.5% plus 50 cents. Further charges sit outside that rate. A sale that came through an affiliate referral costs the merchant an extra 3%, and the affiliate's payout carries 2%. A payment recovered by an abandoned cart email costs an extra 5%. Payouts are priced separately again: free to a United States bank account through Stripe, 1% per payout to a bank outside the United States, a flat 50 cents for PayPal payouts to United States accounts, and 3% capped at 30 dollars for PayPal payouts elsewhere. Sellers with high transaction volume, fast growth, or products priced below 10 dollars can approach the sales team for custom pricing, which is the route worth taking when the fixed 50 cents is a meaningful share of the price. The selling tools themselves are conventional but complete. Checkout can be embedded on any website or shared as a hosted link, and there is a hosted store front that a custom domain can be attached to. Up to 21 payment methods are accepted, PayPal among them. Licence keys are issued automatically after a sale and can be deactivated and reissued, and download links for digital files are signed and throttled against abuse. Subscriptions bill weekly, monthly or yearly, with upgrades, downgrades, cancellations, free trials and discounts handled by the platform, and per seat and usage-based billing are both available. Card retries and failed payment recovery are built in, and the dashboard reports monthly recurring revenue, refunds and average order value. Email marketing is a separate product with its own pricing: free for up to 500 subscribers, then charged by total subscriber count.
What Stripe is
Stripe is a payments platform that businesses use to take card payments online and in person, and to run the billing, invoicing, tax and payout work that sits around them. It accepts payments in more than 135 currencies and supports more than 125 payment methods, including Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Klarna, Affirm, iDEAL, Pix, UPI, Boleto and OXXO. Its prebuilt payment surfaces are named Checkout, Payment Links, Elements and the Payment Element. The rates that follow are taken from Stripe's UK pricing pages and are quoted in pounds, so they are UK figures rather than global ones. A standard UK-issued card costs 1.5% plus 20p per successful charge. A premium UK card costs 2.8% plus 20p, a card issued elsewhere in the European Economic Area 2.5% plus 20p, and a card issued outside it 3.15% plus 20p. Currency conversion adds 2%. A dispute costs 20.00 GBP and the fee is returned if the merchant wins, while Smart Disputes charges 30% of the disputed amount for each dispute won. Around the core payment, Stripe sells a set of separate products. Billing is 0.7% of billing volume on pay as you go pricing, or from 450.00 GBP a month on an annual plan. Invoicing is 0.4% per paid invoice. Tax calculates for more than 100 countries and every US state across more than 600 product tax categories, and files returns through TaxJar in the US and through Taxually, HOST and Marosa elsewhere. Radar, the fraud screening layer, has four tiers named Lite, Standard, Plus and Pro, with Lite carrying no extra charge for businesses on standard payments pricing and the paid tiers starting at 8 GBP a month. Connect is the part built for platforms and marketplaces that pay out to other people. Its onboarding flow covers more than 46 countries in 14 languages, payouts cost 0.25% plus 10p, and instant payouts cost 1% of the amount sent. Issuing creates cards, at 10p for a virtual card and 3.50 GBP for a standard physical one, with no per-transaction fee on the first 500,000 GBP of card transactions. Terminal covers payments taken in person, at 1.4% plus 10p on EEA cards and 2.9% plus 10p on non-EEA cards, with readers priced from 49 GBP for a BBPOS WisePad 3 to 229 GBP for a Stripe Reader S700 or S710, excluding VAT.
We are not affiliated with either product. Upvote counts come from the published formula and neither position was paid for.