You are right! The issues usually happen when you add more complexity (tiers, discounts, credit notes, coupons, prepaid credits). Also, what I find very tough is that this is not a « one stop shop »: every single company has it’s own definition of what should be included or excluded from the MRR. I am pretty sure you never end up on an universal definition

I started OpenPay (getopenpay.com) as an alternative to Stripe. We're giving subscription management for free to the HN community for a year

We support all the edge cases you mentioned around variable/tiered pricing, coupons, etc all part of our solution

Paddle is pretty bad. Support is bad in general, the API is bad, you never win a chargeback (you still have to worry about chargebacks). I wanted to try lemonsqueezy but now it's been acquired by stripe, so it will likely turn into another expensive Death Star.

MoR solutions are a good idea; the tax (F*K VATMOSS Europe) / accounting overhead is likely not worth it. Having a single B2B transaction whenever you want is much easier to deal with.

When your income is large enough that the % you'd be saving let you afford developer time to implement and maintain taxes / billing and extra for accounting of thousands of transactions, then go for it and switch to a cheaper solution.

Let's say you make 100k per year: the 2-3k you save on pure stripe won't pay for the extra developer / accounting time to maintain all that.

Until they raise their pricing too.

Currently we use a processor agnostic billing engine - sticky.io - but they were purchased by private equity and are doing private equity things. Raising prices, charging per transaction fees, etc. Plus, their software and api is downright terrible but it's what we decided on 12 years ago so here we are.

Vendor lock-in sucks. Open to payment stack suggestions.

Check out my company OpenPay (getopenpay.com)

I previously bootstrapped a business to 30M ARR and was sick of paying the "subscription tax"

We give you all the tools you need to build and run your subscription business without having to integrate a dozen different tools together and tear your hair out (and also break the bank). Feel free to reach out to us via the contact form–we're giving people on HN one year free

Until you build out your business around their API and processes, and they decide to start charging more... and more..

Obviously you need to use some third party services, but as soon as your business is viable, always be preparing the ability to switch to competitors.