Stripe Tax

Quite a few, but to give an example from high on the list, it appears that a SaaS company would warrant that software sold through Paddle is always bug-free, accept unlimited liability via the related indemnification requirements if it isn't, and yet have no right participate in or even know about any relevant process if something goes wrong. That's a toxic combination and hardly looks like a healthy basis for a mutually beneficial business relationship.

Other concerns related to the considerable flexibility Paddle appear to give themselves in terms of how they represent, price and provide access to whatever is being sold, again apparently without necessarily requiring the consent or possibly even the knowledge of the underlying provider. We're unclear about how much this might be necessary because of merchant of record legal model, but it has little to do with what we'd actually want to use Paddle for or why we'd choose them over other services for collecting payments.

For context, this is a new business but run by a team who have collectively founded multiple others before. Several of us are very much over wasting time and effort on the mechanics of taking money from our customers and complying with whatever rules accompany that. Obviously fees charged by a payment service do matter, but a moderate difference there is still insignificant to us if the service we use can offer enough flexibility for our needs and easy integration, and otherwise takes on as much of the mechanical implementation and regulatory burden as we can shift.

Similarly, there are a number of other product categories where CA's taxability classifications do not match the SST's classifications.

Generally, the total tax they could collect from remote (non-CA) sellers below the $500k nexus threshold is not worth the effort it would take to change things so that CA could join the SST, and moreover, it would require significant changes by CA sellers.

Generally, those same considerations also apply in NY: the cost burden on local sellers to make the change would dwarf any minuscule tax increase from joining the SST.

Whatever it is, reading reviews of Avalara suggests it's beyond the level smaller businesses can afford and has also been increasing dramatically from one year to the next for some time.

Avalara have a strong web presence because they've always been good at presenting key information like current tax rates and forthcoming changes. Their content marketing is excellent. But as soon as you look for more details about anything they offer, you seem to be straight into "enterprise contact-us sales process" mode.

Stripe targeted developers from day one and made it extremely simple to get up and running (literally seven lines of code for a working payments system) and they documented their api very well.

Then they added on a lot of stuff that made me (as a user) happy, like paying out to my bank account a lot more quickly than the competition, adding recurring subscriptions with a few more lines of code etc.

Basically, their systems just worked out of the box and were more polished than others that I used.