Categories / Payments & Billing
Payments & billing
A curated collection of the best tools for processing payments and sending invoices, used by online sellers and subscription businesses to collect money from customers — 32 tools on Founderkit.
32 tools
Payments and billing tools move money into your business: checkout, invoicing, subscription management, usage metering, tax handling, and dunning for failed charges. The category spans raw payment APIs that developers build on, to merchant-of-record services that take on tax and compliance for you, to billing layers that model complex pricing.
The big fork is processor versus merchant of record. A processor like Stripe gives you maximum control and the lowest fees, but you own sales tax, VAT registration, and invoicing obligations worldwide. Merchant-of-record services cost more per transaction and handle all of it — often the right trade for a small team selling globally.
When choosing, start from your pricing model: flat subscriptions are easy everywhere, while metered usage and seat-based pricing narrow the field fast. Then look at checkout conversion details, payout speed in your country, and what happens when cards fail — recovery flows matter more than most dashboards admit.
Frequently asked questions
- Stripe, Paddle, LemonSqueezy — what's the actual difference?
- Payment processors (like Stripe) charge your customers; you handle tax, invoicing, and fraud liability. Merchant-of-record services (Paddle, LemonSqueezy, Polar) sell on your behalf — they handle sales tax and VAT globally, in exchange for a higher cut. MoR is usually worth it for small teams selling internationally.
- When do I need a billing layer on top of my payment processor?
- When your pricing gets complicated — metered usage, seats, trials that convert, annual/monthly mix, upgrades mid-cycle. Stripe Billing covers a lot; dedicated billing tools earn their fee when you're modeling usage-heavy pricing or need complex entitlements.
- How much should I worry about failed payments?
- A lot — involuntary churn from expired cards and soft declines quietly eats 5-10% of MRR at scale. Most processors retry automatically; dunning tools go further with smart retry timing and pre-expiry emails. For any real subscription business it's the cheapest revenue you'll recover.
- Can I avoid paying international VAT/sales tax myself?
- Only by using a merchant of record — they take on the tax liability because they're the legal seller. If you use a plain processor, you're responsible for registering and remitting in every jurisdiction where you cross thresholds, which is why many indie products go MoR.
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