Stripe Just Made An Unexpected Acquisition

Lemon Squeezy is a pretty cool solution to the tax problems every company has to deal with. Merchant of Record (MOR) is a field that needs more investment and exploration, and I'm excited to see what Stripe does with this acquisition 👀

S/O Ph4se0n3 for the awesome edit and Ben Davis for the thumbnail 🙏

[francoisschoeman]

Not everyone lives in the US where Stripe is readily available. Lemon Squeezy supports South Africa (unlike Stripe), and I hope it stays that way after the acquisition.

[min_live]

My friends used to tell me that Stripe was awful and how Lemon Squeezy was far better than Stripe, but now I'm laughing because of the acquisition.

[spaceemotion]

I can only mirror what other's have said about LS: they are not a good solution and we still have issues with them to this day, even though we tried to migrate to Paddle.

We now have to run both MoRs at the same time, because the export from LS doesn't include half the details we need, the systems LS run break half the time (e.g. webhooks are missing or are empty), there is no way to see a stream of transactions (LS does not even have their order timeline available to the API), and the charts they have on their dashboard randomly change numbers if something changed that you weren't notified about.

The high payout fees sometimes are about 20% of what you made; depending on factors like subscriptions outside the US, currency conversions, high payout fees - yes, extra fees just to get the money to your bank account, and more.

If one looks at their Slack, it's full of people complaining about long wait times, unresponsive support and missing payouts (sometimes for months). We also have a better global reach with Paddle than we have with LS, as Paddle also uses other payment providers than Stripe (especially good when you have customers in emerging markets).

[voyager_ll]

Another challenge in the EU related to payment processing is invoicing which has a bunch of gotchas depending on the country of origin 😅

[Technopath]

Alright, I've been thinking. When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade - make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don't want your damn lemons, what am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life's manager. Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons. Do you know who I am? I'm the man who's gonna burn your house down! With the lemons. I'm going to to get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!

[TheNerdyPlayer]

You don't have to incorporate a business in every country. You can apply for a special VAT status since the user has to pay the VAT of their country but the special status takes care of it, so you make a quarterly payment and that's it.

[tttommmeke]

The EU as a concept is specifically made so you DON'T need to incorperate in every country of the EU. I'm sure there are other caveates in our system, but i'm pretty sure that statement is wrong.

[devinosborne]

@t3dotgg, if you remember, I chatted with you about this at React Conf this year. Though I'm hopeful this acquisition is good overall, I can confidently tell you that Lemon Squeezy currently (and has been) complete garbage. Imagine you're building a SaaS product that is, of course, only online, and the ONLY way you can make money is if people are able to purchase your product. Well with Lemon Squeezy (LS), you would almost think that isn't true.

LS has countless issues from their UI being slower than my moms 3g iphone from 2008, APIs inconsistently serviceable, our payment records/dashboards being completely screwed up from the Lemon Squeezy conducted import of our data from Stripe. And don't even get me started on their "integration" with Paypal. It just doesn't work. And I spend hours every week attempting to manually update my customers subscriptions in our database because LS didn't send a webhook for paypal! OR I just don't get paid from Paypal subscriptions... The list goes on and on.

Nonetheless, I'm hopeful Stripe injects about a billion dollars into the product because it's something so many of us need. I'm shocked they're going this avenue though, because they mentioned at Stripe Sessions this year they would be allowing integrated tax payments in the US "later this year". Just surprising to see LS is the choice.

If you're looking for a tax provider solution. I'd recommend just NOT paying taxes. It's cheaper AND way easier in the end (you can pay penalty fees in the future which are negligible). I wish someone would have told me before I made the jump from Stripe.

[xPorkchopsx]

Their fees are too high. I'd rather break foreign tax laws along with everyone else since it seems like nothing's being done about it.

[arfathahmed]

Unfortunately, while really attractive, LemonSqueezy is extremely buggy. We’ve been testing it out and I’ve lost count of the bugs I’ve encountered. I would highly recommend everyone to join the their support’s Slack channel and look at the volume of complaints they receive with unhelpful responses or none at all. I hope this acquisition improves support and pushes them to work on their bugs.

[CaleMcCollough]

As an entrepreneur, I'm jealous of that startup.

[samuelgunter]

id pay 10% + $1.00 if they can bring an infinite amount of customers too

[lynxcatlife]

I've been on board with Lemon Squeezy since they were first announced, so crazy to see this years later!

[limbo]

Lemon Squeezy? CEO played too much Adventure Capitalist 😆

[frezzingaces]

Or.... they're just killing a competitor via buying them.

[kevgoeswoof]

Americans complaining about EU tax law is funny to me considering the complexity of US tax code. Having been involved in running a business in both the EU and US, I prefer the EU, lol.

[ramanhalder]

As a developer residing in India. Glad to see stripe now with lemonsqueezy becoming invite only. Wish there was any way but it was good when it lasted.

[Qefx]

The whole website from lemon looks like: ACQUIRE US! PLEAAASSSEEE!! lmao

[global]

I'm curious how much it even matters if you break tax law in a country that you have no physical presence in. The EU is obviously a pretty big market, but taken to the logical extreme, would I have to incorporate in, say Jamaica, just because one person there signs up for a digital service I'm offering? What could they even do?

[vnhg]

Lemon Squeezy seems to be mostly for influencers with allot of followers. Lets see if the Stripe acquisition can encourage them to welcome the common folk.