Lemon Squeezy alternatives

Lemon Squeezy charges 5% plus 50 cents on every sale. In exchange it becomes your merchant of record, running the checkout under its own name and handling worldwide tax on your behalf. That is a real service. The price is a permanent percentage of everything you will ever sell.

ByteSell takes the opposite position. You are the merchant of record, buyers pay your own Stripe, PayPal or crypto wallet directly, and the platform fee is 0% on every plan, starting with a free one. On $10,000 of $50 sales, 5% plus 50 cents comes to $600. ByteSell’s share of that same month is zero, and your store carries your name on your own domain instead of someone else’s.

The trade-off is real. ByteSell is not a merchant of record, so moving here means handling your own tax, and for a software seller selling worldwide that is the whole reason Lemon Squeezy charges what it charges.

Start with what is not true. Lemon Squeezy has not announced a shutdown. No vendor page states an end date, a forced migration deadline, or closed signups, and anyone telling you otherwise is guessing.

What is documented: Stripe bought the company in 2024, and Lemon Squeezy now says its goal is to give users an easy way to migrate to Stripe Managed Payments. Signing up no longer opens a store directly. The registration page is a form that recommends a Stripe product based on your business.

On cost, the fee is 5% + 50¢ charged on the total including tax, with 1.5% more on international transactions, 1.5% more through PayPal, 0.5% more on subscriptions and 5% more on anything recovered by an abandoned-cart email. A dispute costs $15 and the platform fee is not returned on a refund.

The reason people put up with it is real: Lemon Squeezy is the merchant of record and handles tax worldwide, and its license-key API is a proper one with activation limits, named instances and expiry. If either is why you are there, weigh the alternatives on that first.