Lemon Squeezy vs Wise
Both are finance tools. Here is what separates them.
| Lemon Squeezy | Wise | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Finance | Finance |
| Pricing model | paid | paid |
| Price from | Paid | Paid |
| Upvotes | 16 | 9 |
| What it does | A merchant of record, so sales tax stops being your problem. | Send money across currencies at a rate you can check yourself. |
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 Wise is
Wise is an account for holding, sending and receiving money in several currencies at once. It converts money at the mid-market exchange rate and charges a separate, stated fee on top. Transfer and conversion fees start from 0.23% and vary by currency, with a volume discount once a customer sends more than 25,000 USD or the equivalent. Registering an account is free, holding money in it is free, and there is no subscription fee. The figures below come from Wise's US pages and are quoted in dollars. An account holds and manages 40 currencies and provides local account details for receiving money in 20 of them. Domestic incoming payments in AUD, CAD, EUR, GBP, HUF, NZD, PHP, SGD and USD are free, while receiving by SWIFT costs 6.11 USD for dollars, 2.16 GBP for sterling and 2.39 EUR for euros. Sending money to another Wise user in the same currency is free. Transfers can be funded by debit card, credit card, bank transfer, direct debit or an existing Wise balance, and Wise states that 74% of its transfers arrive in under 20 seconds and 95% in less than a day. The Wise card costs a one-time fee of 9 USD and can be spent across 150 countries and territories. Purchases made in a currency already held in the account are free. ATM withdrawals are free up to a total of 250 USD per calendar month, after which each further withdrawal costs 1.95 USD plus 1.95%. Topping up an e-wallet with the card costs 2%. Digital cards are issued alongside physical ones, and a card can be frozen and unfrozen from the app. The business account has a one-time setup fee of 31 USD and comes with account details for receiving in 22 currencies. BatchTransfer pays up to 1,000 recipients in a single action, there is a public API documented at docs.wise.com, and team members can be given physical or digital cards with per-card spending controls. Wise states that 96% of its international business payments take less than 24 hours. An opt-in feature called Wise Interest pays a return on GBP, EUR and USD balances at rates that differ by currency, with passthrough FDIC insurance up to a total of 250,000 USD through its program bank, though it is not available to residents of New York or Alaska.
We are not affiliated with either product. Upvote counts come from the published formula and neither position was paid for.