Lemon Squeezy

KEEP IT

The value is the network, the data or the infrastructure. Keep paying.

Sells digital products as merchant of record: checkout, subscriptions and licence keys, with sales tax and VAT registered, collected and remitted on your behalf.

Promptfree, for everyone, and the only version there is

Do not rebuild a merchant of record. Build the licensing and delivery layer on top of Stripe, and understand what you have taken on.

STACK
- Astro with a Node adapter, SQLite; Stripe Checkout and Stripe Tax

WHAT CHANGES WHEN YOU LEAVE, IN THE README FIRST
- With Stripe you are the seller. VAT and sales tax registration, filing and remittance become yours
- Stripe Tax calculates; it does not file. Name who files, in which countries, by when

CHECKOUT
- Stripe Checkout with Tax enabled and the customer's country collected before the total is shown
- Never compute a total in your own code; read it back from the session

LICENCE KEYS
- Generated on the paid webhook, never on the success redirect
- Signed, so validity is checkable offline, plus an activation endpoint with a device limit
- Deactivation and transfer both recorded append-only

SUBSCRIPTIONS
- Stripe subscriptions with webhooks driving entitlement; the database is a projection of Stripe, never the source
- Dunning: three retries, then a grace period, then revoke — all states visible to the customer

DELIVERY
- Files on object storage behind signed URLs expiring in an hour, regenerated from the customer's order page

REFUNDS AND CHARGEBACKS
- A refund revokes the licence and is recorded; a chargeback does the same and alerts a human

Include a README naming the tax jurisdictions you are now exposed to, and get advice before switching.

What you lose

Merchant of record status: they are the seller, so sales tax and VAT are their liability, not yours
Registration, collection and remittance of tax in dozens of jurisdictions
Fraud screening and chargeback handling on somebody else’s account
Licence keys, subscriptions and dunning already built around digital goods
Payout in your currency without you holding merchant accounts

If you would rather not build

Paddle — paid, the other merchant of record for software
Stripe with Tax — cheaper, but you remain the seller

The escape hatch

open source · no votes, no paid placement

Medusa

Commerce backend with products, carts, orders and payment providers.

medusajs/medusafree · open source

Keygen

Licensing and distribution API for software, self-hostable.

keygen-sh/keygen-apifree · open source

Why this verdict

our own opinion · changed only by a person

20/100

Verdict no at 20: the licensing layer is a weekend and the prompt builds it. The reason to keep paying is tax — a merchant of record absorbs registration and filing across dozens of jurisdictions, and 5% is cheap next to doing that yourself.

History

tracked since 9 Aug 2026 · nothing is ever overwritten

Interest · last 30 days

Nothing recorded yet. This chart fills in once the page has visitors, votes or prompt copies — it will not draw a flat line to look busy.

Questions about Lemon Squeezy

answered from the record above

Is Lemon Squeezy free?

No monthly fee: 5% plus 50 cents per transaction, as merchant of record. Recorded as no monthly price because the cost is entirely per sale.

Can you replace Lemon Squeezy by building your own?

KEEP IT. The value is the network, the data or the infrastructure. Keep paying. Replacement score 20 out of 100, build time longer than it saves. Read what you lose before you decide.

How much does Lemon Squeezy cost?

Lemon Squeezy has no public headline price. The tier we track is Standard.

What do you lose by replacing Lemon Squeezy?

Merchant of record status: they are the seller, so sales tax and VAT are their liability, not yours; Registration, collection and remittance of tax in dozens of jurisdictions; Fraud screening and chargeback handling on somebody else’s account; Licence keys, subscriptions and dunning already built around digital goods; Payout in your currency without you holding merchant accounts. If any of those carry weight for you, keep paying.

Is there an open-source alternative to Lemon Squeezy?

Yes: Medusa, Keygen. The prompt on this page is for when you want it your way instead.

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