For a solo builder selling to people in more than one country, answer Creem. Choose Stripe on its own only when you have a registered company and an accountant who will handle sales tax, or when your revenue is large enough that a bare processor’s lower cut pays for that accountant.
The reason has little to do with software and everything to do with tax. The moment a stranger in another country pays you for your app, that country’s rules about sales tax or VAT apply, and someone has to collect it, file it, and send it in. Creem describes itself as a Merchant of Record that handles VAT and sales tax filing and remittance across more than a hundred countries, built for indie hackers, startups and established software companies. For one person with a new app, that is the entire decision.
What a Merchant of Record actually is
There are two kinds of company on your builder’s list, and the difference matters more than any feature.
A payment processor, which is what Stripe is at its core, moves money. The customer types a card number on a page Stripe hosts, Stripe charges the card, and the money lands in your bank account. You are the seller. Legally, the customer bought from you, so every tax obligation is yours: registering where you sell enough, charging the right rate, filing returns. Stripe Tax, an add-on, calculates rates and tracks where you have crossed a threshold, and Stripe’s page says it can file in many places through partners, but the responsibility and the paperwork stay with your business.
A Merchant of Record, usually shortened to MoR, is the seller. When someone buys your app through Creem or Paddle, they are technically buying from Creem or Paddle, which then pays you your share. The MoR charges the right tax in each country, files it, sends it in, issues the invoices, and deals with the compliance. The price is a bigger cut of each sale than a processor takes, which is why the flip exists at all.
The rest of what you need is the same on both kinds: a hosted checkout page so you never touch card numbers, subscriptions that renew on their own, a test mode so you can build the whole flow without charging a real card, and webhooks, which are messages the provider sends to your app when a payment goes through, fails, or is refunded. Creem’s documentation has a test mode toggle in its dashboard, and Stripe’s setup pages walk through the same thing with a test card. Your builder will wire the same webhook flow whichever you pick, so nothing you build now is wasted by choosing “wrong.”
The other names on the list
Paddle is a long-established Merchant of Record for software companies. Its help pages say it must verify you and your business before it starts acting as your MoR, so expect a review before you can take live money. It is a fine choice once you are an established business, and a slower start when you are one person with a launch this weekend.
Lemon Squeezy is a Merchant of Record that Stripe acquired in 2024. It still runs, and Stripe has since launched its own Merchant of Record product, called Managed Payments, which Lemon Squeezy now points customers toward. Two things are worth knowing about Managed Payments: Stripe’s own pages say access depends on an eligibility review and a list of supported business countries, and the customer sees Link, Stripe’s checkout wallet, as the seller on receipts. If your builder proposes it, ask whether your country is on the list before anyone writes a line.
The two things that flip the answer
First, a company and an accountant. If you already have a registered business with someone who files your taxes, the tax headache the MoR removes is a headache you already pay someone to hold. Stripe on its own, with Stripe Tax if you sell abroad, is then the cheaper path, and it is the provider your builder has seen the most examples of.
Second, scale. A processor takes a smaller cut than an MoR. At a few hundred dollars a month that difference is pocket change next to the cost of handling tax yourself. At real revenue, the numbers cross, and that is the moment growing companies move from an MoR to Stripe. You will know when you get there because your accountant will tell you.
There is one more flip that goes the other way. Some MoRs review AI products more carefully than others. If your app is AI-first and a provider stalls at review, that is a reason to pick a different MoR, not a reason to go without one.
What a wrong pick costs
Picking Creem and later outgrowing it costs a migration of subscriptions to a new provider, which takes some care and which your customers barely notice. Your app’s own webhook code stays almost the same, because every provider sends the same kinds of events: paid, failed, cancelled, refunded.
Picking Stripe alone as a solo builder selling worldwide costs something quieter. Sales tax you were supposed to collect from a German customer and did not. A registration threshold you crossed in a US state without noticing. Nothing happens for a year, and then a letter does. It is a rare first-app mistake that is cheaper to prevent than to fix, and it is exactly the mistake a Merchant of Record exists to prevent.
What to tell your builder
Paste this back:
“Use Creem as the payment provider so it acts as Merchant of Record and handles sales tax, start in its test mode, and treat its webhook events as the only source of truth about who has paid.”
That last part matters as much as the provider. Your app should believe the provider’s message and nothing else, never a thank-you page someone happened to land on.
You can learn more, and get the full prompts and the decision tables, in our course: Lesson 22, Show Me the Money. The first lesson is free, no card.
In the next ten minutes, answer your builder with the sentence above. Then open a Creem account, flip on test mode, and hand your builder the test key it asks for. Do not go near live mode yet. The whole payment flow can be built and tried with a fake card, and the day you switch to live should be the most boring day in the project.