Lemon Squeezy

Lemon Squeezy solves the single biggest headache of selling digital products globally: tax compliance. As your merchant of record, Lemon Squeezy handles VAT, sales tax, and GST collection and remittance across 190+ countries. You never file a tax return for digital sales. That alone is worth the fee for most indie developers.

Stripe acquired Lemon Squeezy in 2024, and the team is now building Stripe Managed Payments, which brings Lemon Squeezy's simplicity to Stripe's infrastructure. The existing Lemon Squeezy platform continues to operate, but the long-term play is clear: merchant-of-record functionality at Stripe scale.

The core fee is 5% + $0.50 per transaction. On top of that, expect +1.5% for international (non-US) card payments, +1.5% for PayPal, and +0.5% for subscription renewals. On a $20 product sold to someone in France, you net roughly $17.94 after the platform fee and VAT. That 8-10% total take rate is higher than running Stripe directly (2.9% + $0.30), but Stripe alone doesn't handle tax compliance. Adding a service like Taxamo or TaxJar runs $200-500/month, which makes Lemon Squeezy cheaper until you're processing $5,000+/month.

The platform handles license key generation, secure file delivery with download limits, subscription billing with dunning, and a customer self-service portal. There's a built-in affiliate program with automated commission tracking and payouts (3% additional fee on affiliate sales). The checkout experience localizes currency, payment methods, and tax-inclusive pricing automatically.

Where Lemon Squeezy falls short: customization. You're working within their checkout and portal designs. Complex billing scenarios (usage-based pricing, multi-currency wallets, metered billing) aren't supported. If you need that flexibility, you're back to Stripe + a tax service. The developer API is clean but less mature than Stripe's ecosystem of libraries and plugins.