Should your SaaS use a PSP like Stripe or a MOR like Paddle?

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.

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