Stripe vs Lemon Squeezy for SaaS Payments

Choosing a payment provider is one of the first real decisions for any SaaS or digital-product business. Stripe and Lemon Squeezy solve the same problem very differently.

The core difference: merchant of record

Lemon Squeezy is a merchant of record (MoR). It sells your product on your behalf and takes on the responsibility for collecting and remitting sales tax and VAT worldwide. Stripe is a payment processor — you're the merchant, so calculating and remitting tax is your job (or Stripe Tax's, for an extra fee).

Fees

• Stripe: roughly 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction, plus fees for Tax, Billing, and currency conversion.
• Lemon Squeezy: a higher flat rate that bundles tax compliance and MoR services in.
• For a small team selling globally, the bundled compliance can be worth the higher rate; at scale, Stripe's lower per-transaction cost usually wins.

Developer experience

Both offer clean APIs, hosted checkouts, and webhooks. Stripe has the deeper, more flexible API and better docs for complex billing (metered usage, proration, complex subscriptions). Lemon Squeezy is faster to integrate for straightforward one-time purchases and simple subscriptions.

Which should you pick?

If you sell digital products or templates globally and want to ignore tax compliance, start with Lemon Squeezy. If you need advanced billing logic or you're already at scale, Stripe's flexibility and lower fees pay off. Many teams start on an MoR and migrate to Stripe later.

KitCraft templates include a payments layer with webhook handling and license delivery, so you can plug in either provider and start selling quickly.