Lemon Squeezy

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.