Skip to content
Compare

A Paddle alternative that charges a flat fee, not a percentage.

Paddle is a merchant of record: it sells your product for you, collects the tax, and keeps 5% plus 50 cents of every transaction. Teams look elsewhere when that share grows faster than the service behind it, or when they want the customer, the payment account and the data to be their own. yRecurring is a billing engine on your own payment account, from $39 a month.

The two are different shapes of product. Paddle is the seller of record: it takes the payment, remits sales tax and VAT, handles chargebacks and buyer support, and pays you out. yRecurring runs your subscriptions, invoices and recovery on a payment account you own, and charges a flat monthly price for it. The right comparison is what you keep, what you own, and what you have to do yourself.

Side by side

PaddleyRecurring
What you pay5% plus 50 cents per checkout transaction; custom pricing at volumeLaunch: $39/mo flat, up to $10,000/mo billed; $99 and $299 bands above
At $25,000 a month, $50 average saleAbout $1,500 a month$99 a month, plus your own gateway's processing fee
Who the customer paysPaddle, as merchant of recordYou, through your own Stripe, PayPal, Braintree or GoCardless account
Sales tax and VATCollected and remitted by PaddleRegion rates applied at invoice time; a provider seam for automated tax
Saved cards when you leaveHeld in Paddle's vault; transferred to a new provider on requestHeld by your own gateway; they were never anywhere else
Invoicing and net termsCheckout centered; invoicing needs custom pricingInvoices, net 30/60/90, bank transfer, consolidated billing, all included
Why is this amount X?Transaction totalsA receipt on every amount: formula, inputs, each step

Competitor pricing is taken from their public pricing page, checked 24 September 2026. If something here is out of date, tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it. Paddle's fee includes payment processing and tax handling, which you pay separately with yRecurring; the fee calculator shows both side by side.

Where Paddle is the better fit

  • You sell to consumers in many countries and want someone else to be the seller of record for tax and compliance.
  • You have no finance function and want payouts, tax and chargebacks handled as one service.
  • Your average sale is large enough that 5% is cheaper than running billing yourself.

Where yRecurring differs

You keep the customer relationship

The payment account is yours, the customer records are yours, and the saved cards live with your gateway. Leaving yRecurring is an export, not a negotiation.

A flat price, whatever you sell

5% of $25,000 a month is $1,250 before the fixed fees. yRecurring is $99 at that volume, and the price only moves when you cross a band.

Invoices, retainers and usage, not just checkouts

Net terms, bank transfers, consolidated invoices, prepaid credits and metered usage are all in the same engine, so a business that sells more than one way does not need a second tool.

Every amount carries a receipt

Proration, tiers, taxes and credits combine into numbers customers question. Every yRecurring amount links to its calculation, one click from the invoice.

Questions teams ask

Does yRecurring handle sales tax like Paddle does?

Not as a merchant of record. yRecurring applies the tax rates you configure at invoice time and can hand tax calculation to a provider; registering and remitting stay with you, as they do on any billing engine that is not the seller of record.

Can I move my Paddle subscribers over?

Yes. Export subscriptions, transactions and prices from Paddle's reports, import them with the AI assisted import (dry run first), and ask Paddle to transfer your customers' saved payment details to your new payment provider's vault. The switching guide walks through it.

Does yRecurring charge a percentage of my revenue?

Plans are flat: $39, $99, or $299 per month, banded by how much you bill through the platform. If you grow past your band mid month, the overage is capped at the next tier's price, so the most a growth month can cost you is the plan you would upgrade to anyway. Your effective rate falls as you grow. Above the Scale band, pricing is custom.

Is yRecurring a merchant of record?

No. Your customers pay through your own payment gateway accounts (Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, GoCardless, and more), so the money and the gateway relationship stay yours. yRecurring is the billing engine: subscriptions, invoices, recovery, and reporting.

See your own pricing in it.

The fastest comparison is your real catalog inside the trial: import your data, dry run first, and look at an invoice with the calculation open.

14-day free trial · everything on · no credit card