Paddle

Paddle is a payment infrastructure platform designed for SaaS, software, and digital product companies. It helps businesses handle payments, subscriptions, taxes, billing, and compliance globally in one system.

Instead of integrating multiple payment tools, companies use Paddle to sell their software worldwide without managing payment complexity themselves.

What Paddle does

Paddle acts as a Merchant of Record (MoR).

This means:

Customers pay Paddle, not the software company directly.

Paddle processes the payment and handles tax, compliance, and fraud protection.

After deducting fees, Paddle sends the revenue to the business.

This model lets software companies sell globally without dealing with tax laws or payment regulations in every country.

Key features

1. Global payment processing

Accept payments from 200+ countries

Supports cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay.

2. Subscription billing

Recurring subscriptions

upgrades/downgrades

usage-based billing.

3. Tax & compliance automation

Automatically calculates VAT, GST, sales tax globally.

4. Failed payment recovery

Automatically retries failed payments to reduce churn.

5. Revenue analytics

Includes tools like ProfitWell Metrics to track SaaS revenue.

Who uses Paddle

More than 6,000 software companies use Paddle to manage their billing and payments.

Typical users:

SaaS startups

AI tools

mobile apps

digital product creators

game developers

Examples mentioned by Paddle include companies like MacPaw and GeoGuessr.

Company details

Founded: 2012

Founders: Christian Owens and Harrison Rose

Headquarters: United Kingdom

Funding raised: about $291M

Valuation: about $1.4B (unicorn).

Simple explanation

Think of Paddle as:

Stripe + subscription billing + tax compliance combined for SaaS businesses.

Instead of building your own billing system, you just plug Paddle into your app.