Alternatives to Stripe
Payments infrastructure for the internet.
- What is Stripe?
- Payment processing infrastructure from Stripe, offered as APIs and a dashboard that developers embed into websites and apps.
- What does it do?
- Handles card and wallet payments, subscriptions, invoicing, payouts and fraud checks through APIs or a hosted checkout page. Connect covers marketplace and platform payouts, and Stripe Tax calculates sales tax and VAT at checkout.
- Who is it for?
- Developers and finance teams at companies that want to own their billing stack and integrate it directly. Less suited to a solo maker selling a digital product who wants someone else to be the seller of record.
- What are the alternatives to Stripe?
- Lemon Squeezy and Paddle act as merchant of record and handle sales tax on your behalf. Polar targets developers selling digital products, and Memberful is narrower — memberships and recurring access for creators.
Pricing
2.9% + 30¢ per transaction
Paid
About
Founded 2010
San Francisco / Dublin
Founders
The people behind Stripe.
About Stripe
Stripe is the default global payments processor and the company most fintech founders point to as a north star. The API and docs are the gold standard, the dashboard handles 90% of what you'd want before reaching for an integration, and the product surface area has grown to include billing, tax, treasury, and atlas. The cost: 2.9% + 30¢ in the US (more cross-border), per-product pricing for Radar/Atlas/Tax, and a meaningful operational burden if you're selling internationally — VAT, sales tax, and chargebacks are all your problem.
✓Best for
- Developer-first products charging primarily US/CA customers
- Marketplaces and platforms that need Stripe Connect's payout splitting
- Teams that want best-in-class API quality and don't mind handling tax themselves
Top alternatives
Smaller, founder-led tools that quietly compete with Stripe.
Merchant of Record for digital products.
An favourite handling tax, EU VAT and payouts — now part of Stripe but still founder-led.
Open-source MoR for developers.
Modern, open-source merchant of record built for SaaS.
Merchant of Record billing platform.
Handles tax and subscriptions for SaaS founders.
Membership and subscription payments.
Tiny team owned by Patreon, perfect for creator subscriptions.
Drop-in shopping cart for any site.
Independent Canadian team focused on bring-your-own-frontend commerce.
Subscriptions + CRM + email for SaaS.
Bootstrapped all-in-one with subscription billing baked in.
MoR built for the hacker era.
Newer merchant-of-record for SaaS and digital products.
Global commerce platform.
A long-running MoR alternative used by software companies.