The email subject was calm. The body wasn't. Something about VAT registrations I thought we'd handled in Stripe Tax. I didn't sleep great.
Don't rip out Stripe because one email panicked you. Pull last-quarter revenue by country. If cross-border volume is real and nobody owns tax weekly, price a merchant-of-record option like Paddle. If volume is mostly domestic and you have a finance owner, fix Stripe config and stay.
What I checked before migrating
- Where buyers actually are
- Current fee drag
- Who answers dispute emails
- Whether checkout customization still matters
Migration week is a product outage with paperwork. Treat it like one.
When MoR won the spreadsheet
For a small B2C SaaS selling into the EU without a finance hire, MoR fees beat founder nights reading tax posts. For a B2B tool with US-heavy volume and a bookkeeper, Stripe stayed.
Details live on Stripe vs Paddle. The email was a symptom. Ownership was the disease.
The rule I kept
Someone's name goes next to "tax config" every Monday. If that name is empty, you're already in migration territory — you just haven't admitted it.
