Apple actually ran a comparison of both of these companies recently in their court filings - they determined companies with a lot of payments could do it cheaper themselves.
> Stripe and Paddle are leading full-service, turnkey payment processing, and merchant-of-record providers handling all the services necessary for link-out, including payment processing, tax compliance, fraud detection, and customer service. Id. ¶ 82. Across the top apps, the mean implied processing and merchant-of-record fee based on Stripe’s and Paddle’s rack rates (which few, if any, large developers actually pay because they negotiate discounts or provision in-house) is 8.1% using Stripe rates, or 7.8% using Paddle rates
> Large developers often negotiate processing fees below published rates or perform processing more cheaply in-house.
> Epic’s Head of Payments, testified at trial in this case that Epic’s “average cost of using . . .
payment service providers … [i]n [the] U.S., [is] around 3.5%” and “Epic [has] the opportunity to
negotiate these costs with its payment service providers.
Stripe Managed Payments actually looks better than most Mors in terms of cash flow. I came to the conclusion that eventually it makes more sense for the company to handle it themselves as they grow but in the early days do you really want to be handling massive tax compliance issues?
Stripe Managed Payments is MoR too - https://stripe.com/managed-payments
Apple actually ran a comparison of both of these companies recently in their court filings - they determined companies with a lot of payments could do it cheaper themselves.
> Stripe and Paddle are leading full-service, turnkey payment processing, and merchant-of-record providers handling all the services necessary for link-out, including payment processing, tax compliance, fraud detection, and customer service. Id. ¶ 82. Across the top apps, the mean implied processing and merchant-of-record fee based on Stripe’s and Paddle’s rack rates (which few, if any, large developers actually pay because they negotiate discounts or provision in-house) is 8.1% using Stripe rates, or 7.8% using Paddle rates
> Large developers often negotiate processing fees below published rates or perform processing more cheaply in-house.
> Epic’s Head of Payments, testified at trial in this case that Epic’s “average cost of using . . . payment service providers … [i]n [the] U.S., [is] around 3.5%” and “Epic [has] the opportunity to negotiate these costs with its payment service providers.
https://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2026/08/Epic_...
Stripe Managed Payments actually looks better than most Mors in terms of cash flow. I came to the conclusion that eventually it makes more sense for the company to handle it themselves as they grow but in the early days do you really want to be handling massive tax compliance issues?