Answer six questions about where you sell, who you sell to, whether you want a Merchant of Record, your subscription model, your checkout posture, and your current revenue band. Get back one recommended payment processor from Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, Polar, Chargebee, Outseta, or Recurly — with two runner-ups and an estimated effective fee at your stated revenue.
Methodology. Pricing verified against vendor pricing pages (Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, Polar, Chargebee, Outseta) as of June 2026. The picker uses deterministic decision rules — no AI black box. Recommendations are a research synthesis of public docs and community reports, not first-person hands-on tests. Override the default if your situation doesn’t fit, and read the “when to override” section below.
Your winner is highlighted. Yes/partial/no marks each processor against the requirements implied by your answers.
The picker is a deterministic six-rule decision tree. The rule order encodes what we’ve seen actually break founders: global tax compliance fires first because retrofitting a Merchant of Record onto a Stripe-only setup that suddenly has EU buyers is a months-long migration; subscription complexity (usage-based, hybrid) fires second because Stripe Billing’s pricing model rewards complexity while most MoR alternatives charge a flat percentage regardless; market segment (B2C vs B2B vs enterprise) fires third because B2B enterprise often demands invoicing and net-30 terms that consumer-grade processors don’t handle gracefully; revenue band fires last because the per-transaction percentage delta only matters at scale.
The seven processors covered are the realistic decision space for solo and small-team SaaS in 2026: Stripe for direct US and US/EU selling; Lemon Squeezy for global selling with the Merchant of Record model; Paddle as the more enterprise-leaning MoR alternative; Polar as the open-source MoR challenger; Chargebee for B2B subscription complexity with proper invoicing; Outseta as the all-in-one B2C bootstrapper bundle; and Recurly for enterprise subscription management. We deliberately exclude PayPal Checkout (developer-hostile DX), Braintree (subsumed by Stripe in most cases), and FastSpring (replaced by Lemon Squeezy and Paddle in mindshare).
Stripe remains the default for US-focused SaaS at 2.9% + $0.30 per successful card transaction. Stripe Tax adds 0.5% per transaction as PAYG or $90/month annually. Stripe Billing is 0.7% on subscription revenue. The full cost analysis lives in Stripe pricing explained. Stripe stays the default because of docs and ecosystem: every boilerplate ships with Stripe wired up, and time-to-first-paid-customer is measured in hours.
Lemon Squeezy charges 5% + $0.50 per transaction as a Merchant of Record. That ~2-point premium over Stripe covers worldwide VAT/GST/sales-tax registration and remittance across 100+ jurisdictions — insurance against the operational nightmare of registering for VAT in seven EU countries by hand. Full comparison in Lemon Squeezy vs Stripe. The downsides are limited checkout customization, hosted-only checkout (no embedded Elements UI), and a more opinionated subscription model.
Paddle charges 5% + $0.50 per Checkout transaction as a Merchant of Record. Roughly equivalent to Lemon Squeezy on headline fees, Paddle leans more enterprise: better B2B invoicing, better revenue recovery via proprietary dunning, and longer-term reputation with venture-backed SaaS pre-migration. If you sell to companies and want a MoR, Paddle is the more credible of the two.
Polar charges 5% + $0.50 per transaction on Starter, falling to 3.8% + $0.40 on Pro and 3.4% + $0.30 on Scale — the open-source Merchant of Record. The pitch is “Lemon Squeezy but open source and cheaper at scale.” DX is genuinely good for developer-first products with native usage-based primitives. Full breakdown in Polar vs Stripe.
Chargebee is the heavyweight for B2B subscription billing. Starter is free for the first $250,000 of cumulative billing, then 0.75% on subsequent volume; Performance starts at $7,188/yr (~$599/mo). Chargebee wins when billing complexity (invoicing terms, contract amendments, dunning sophistication, multi-currency) is your actual problem and you’ve outgrown Stripe Billing. Don’t use it until then; it’s overkill.
Outseta bundles payments, CRM, help desk, email, and member auth at $47/mo Founder (up to 1,000 contacts) + 2% transaction fee, or $87/mo Start-up + 1%. Outseta wins for non-technical bootstrappers building membership sites who want to consolidate three to four SaaS tools into one. Tradeoff: vendor lock and a less polished checkout than Stripe.
Recurly targets enterprise subscription management with custom pricing only. For 99% of solo SaaS founders, the answer is not Recurly; the picker will only suggest it for enterprise B2B at the highest revenue band.
You sell to a single non-US country and the MoR premium isn’t worth it. The picker recommends Lemon Squeezy or Polar when you mark “global.” If your reality is “80% of my customers are in the UK,” registering for UK VAT directly and using Stripe with manual tax registration is cheaper than paying a 5% MoR fee. The MoR premium pays off across 5+ tax jurisdictions, not 1–2. Read what is Merchant of Record for the framework on when it matters.
You’re selling AI usage by the token and need real-time metered billing. The picker may suggest Polar (which has native usage-based primitives) for usage-based subscriptions. But if you’re shipping LLM credits and customers can burn through balance in minutes, Stripe Billing with custom metered usage is the most battle-tested combination. Polar’s usage-based primitives are newer and the failure modes at high cardinality are less documented. Read how to set up Stripe subscriptions with Supabase for the implementation pattern.
You’re launching a marketplace where money flows between buyers and sellers. None of the MoR providers handle multi-party payments cleanly. Stripe Connect is the correct answer for marketplace payments, and it’s the only realistic answer in this list. Don’t try to bolt marketplace flows onto Lemon Squeezy or Paddle; you’ll regret it within months. Read how to set up Stripe Connect for marketplace SaaS for the architecture.
You’re a non-technical bootstrapper building a membership site. The picker may recommend Stripe or Lemon Squeezy. If you genuinely can’t write code and you’re building a membership site (community + content + payments), Outseta’s bundled platform is the right call even though the per-transaction fee is higher than pure Stripe. The math is “Outseta versus Stripe + Memberstack + Mailchimp + Crisp” not “Outseta versus Stripe alone.”
You’re selling B2B contracts with net-30 invoicing and procurement processes. The picker may recommend Stripe at low revenue or Chargebee at high revenue. If your typical sales motion ends in a signed contract and a 30-day invoice payable to your company by ACH, neither Stripe nor a MoR fits cleanly. The answer is Stripe Invoicing + manual reconciliation (cheaper and good enough for under $1M ARR) or Chargebee with proper procurement workflows (when invoicing complexity is the actual blocker). The MoR providers are not designed for net-30 invoicing.
The cost shown on each result card is the effective monthly fee on your stated revenue band. For Stripe, that’s 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction plus 0.5% Stripe Tax for US/EU sellers. For Lemon Squeezy and Paddle, that’s 5% + $0.50 per transaction (all-in: VAT, registration, remittance). For Polar, that’s 5% + $0.50 on Starter, 3.8% + $0.40 on Pro at higher revenue. For Chargebee and Outseta, that’s a fixed monthly fee plus a percentage on billing — the fixed fee dominates at low revenue and the percentage matters at scale. We assume a typical average order value of $30–$50 for SaaS subscriptions; if your AOV is dramatically different (a $5 micro-product or a $5,000 annual contract) the per-transaction $0.30 or $0.50 matters more or less than the band suggests.
What the cost numbers don’t capture is the operational cost of tax compliance. The 2-point Lemon Squeezy or Paddle premium over Stripe looks expensive in spreadsheet form, but for a global B2C SaaS the alternative is VAT registration fees in 10+ jurisdictions plus engineering time on tax rate tables plus the reputational risk of getting it wrong. The picker assumes you’d rather pay 2 points to a Merchant of Record than build that infrastructure. If tax is already a solved problem at your company, the math flips and Stripe wins on raw economics.
Stripe takes one focused afternoon if you’ve done it before, two days if you haven’t. How to set up Stripe subscriptions with Supabase covers the webhook handling that 80% of Stripe beginners get wrong on first attempt; How to add Stripe Tax covers the partial-handover model where you keep Stripe and outsource tax compliance. Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, and Polar all use hosted checkout with webhook-based fulfillment — shorter to integrate than Stripe but with a lower customization ceiling. Chargebee and Recurly sit on top of Stripe; the effort is medium and you trade build time for billing capability. The fatal mistake is spending two weeks comparing processors instead of shipping. Pick one, integrate it this week, charge your first customer next week.
The stack, prompts, pricing, and mistakes to avoid — for solo founders building with AI.