Item: Paddle
Rating: 10
Author: Ben Lachman

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Paddle is a used across Nice Mohawk's mac software titles and was used for analytics in additional mobile products. It presents an integrated sales experience for our customers along with a comprehensive backend that handles payments processing, subscriptions, analytics, and multiplatform SDKs. It 100% satisfies our sales pipeline management as an indie µISV. In particular, their attention to streamlining and optimizing the purchase experience for the customer is highly attractive when compared to the hamhanded interfaces of many other offerings in the space.

Pros and Cons

Super easy to implement SDKs across supported platforms that support modern interface paradigms.
Real team members that provide backend support for merchant issues. We had issues addressed quickly and taken seriously whenever we needed anything.
Help with navigating VAT transparently. We never worried that we were messing up in this complicated area of international sales.
Great first line customer support reduces the need for an extensive customer support organization on our end. They dealt with all purchase related issues as well as lightweight technical issues (e.g pointing users to FAQs, update links, etc.).

Analytics could support more flexible analysis of reported data and better custom events.
More customization of the drop in purchase UI on the web without the need for a full custom site integration.
Sometimes communication from their front line support staff has gone to the wrong address.

Return on Investment

Increased sales due to abandoned cart recovery emails, etc.
Allowed us to experiment with novel in-app "reward for sharing" purchase incentives
Reduced VAT and customer sales support cost to close to zero.

Alternatives Considered

Paddle has better customer experience than other offerings in its class. Provides a low overhead and quick setup solution when compared to direct Stripe integration. It is competitive on rates with other offerings and when features like frontline support, abandoned cart recovery, and user suggestions are factored into their offering, their rates are more than competitive.

Other Software Used

Fusion 360, DocuSign, DocSend

Likelihood to Recommend

We feel that Paddle is well suited in any software offering that requires an in-app purchase flow or a custom built subscription model. It's ease of set up and low overhead make it particularly attractive to small and medium businesses and software vendors that manage multiple products with a similar purchase pipeline.

In very large platform scenarios, a fully custom solution might provide more flexibility since direct integration with the underlying payment processor can be built in-house. With this of course comes the cost of initial engineering and maintenance.

Paddle Review

Overall Satisfaction with Paddle