I sell an API as a service,[0] and I've been using RapidAPI for years. I've never been happy with them. They charge a 20% fee, and then there's another 3-5% fee for payments via PayPal. And they do many small transactions per month, so you pay PayPal's minimum fees over and over, making the total fees about 25-30%. On top of that, their service is terrible. Customer support is rarely helpful, they frequently fail to…
Tying in paddle as merchant of record for all installs shouldn’t be that challenging no? Stripe has connect as well to split but I’m not sure their merchant of record features are as mature.
It's not that hard, but I'm anticipating like 40 hours of work start to finish to get Paddle set up and write the integration.
The one positive thing I'll say about RapidAPI is that they made onboarding easy. They handle all of user signup, payments, etc. and they just forward your API requests from users. The only code I had to write is a few lines to populate a custom HTTP response header to tell RapidAPI how many units of my service the request consumed.
Paddle provides a lot less infrastructure, so I still have to write my own user signup flow. Paddle offers a JS library that does the heavy lifting for user signup, but I still have to integrate it with my website. And then they don't have the proxy model at all, so users talk directly to my backend, and my backend has to check with Paddle to see whether the user is valid or not. Then my backend has to both respond to the user and send a separate request to Paddle to add to the user's bill.
>Stripe has connect as well to split but I’m not sure their merchant of record features are as mature.
I didn't realize Stripe offered MoR at all, but it looks like they do now. My reading is that if I were to sell under RestEasy, then Stripe would indeed act as my MoR because I'm the "third-party seller":
>Is Stripe a merchant of record?
>Stripe is an MoR, but only for its Stripe Connect platform. With Stripe Connect, businesses can create platforms or marketplaces that process payments for third-party sellers. In this case, Stripe serves as the MoR, processing payments and assuming the associated responsibilities on behalf of the third-party sellers.
>However, when businesses use Stripe to process payments for regular direct transactions, the business itself remains the MoR while Stripe acts as a payment processor or payment gateway. This means that the business is responsible for transactional compliance, tax obligations, and managing refunds and chargebacks, while Stripe handles the technical aspects of transaction processing.