Best Merchants of Record

FastSpring

Merchant of Record

B+

FastSpring is a merchant of record for software, SaaS, games and digital products, founded in Santa Barbara in 2005 and trading as Bright Market, LLC. It becomes the legal seller of your product, which means it — not you — owns the payment relationship, the sales tax and VAT obligation, the fraud loss and the chargeback. Its own site claims more than 3,200 customers, over $2 billion in transactions a year, 200-plus regions, 35-plus currencies and 21-plus languages. It holds a BBB A- and is twenty-one years old, both unusual in this category. It publishes no rates.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

4.0

Paddle

Merchant of Record

B

A London merchant of record for software, SaaS and AI companies, founded in 2012 and used by more than 6,000 digital product businesses by its own July 2025 count. It publishes one flat price — 5% + 50¢ — and in exchange becomes the legal seller of your product, taking on global sales tax and VAT registration, filing and liability. That is a real transfer of risk, and it is expensive: roughly double a card processor's rate, paid out once a month rather than daily.

Pricing clarity

4.0

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

4.0

Segpay

Merchant of Record

B

A South Florida high-risk biller founded in 2005, registered with Visa as an internet payment service provider and with Mastercard as a payment facilitator, serving adult, dating, subscription and content merchants across the US, EU, UK and Australia. It publishes its settlement terms in detail and its rates not at all.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5

Xsolla

Merchant of Record

B-

Xsolla is a merchant of record built specifically for video games, founded in Perm, Russia in 2005 as 2Pay by Aleksandr Agapitov, renamed Xsolla in 2011 and headquartered in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles since the company moved to California in 2010. It becomes the legal seller of your game or in-game item, which transfers sales tax, VAT, fraud loss and chargeback liability off the developer and onto Xsolla, and it is the dominant option for direct-to-player web shops that route around the 30% mobile app store cut. Its marketing describes a revenue share as low as 5%, with over 1,000 payment methods across 200-plus markets, 130-plus currencies and 25-plus languages. It publishes no full rate card, and its recent corporate history — a 2021 mass dismissal driven by workforce analytics, six former-executive lawsuits since 2019, and a 2024 Bloomberg investigation into more than $100 million moving between company and founder accounts — deserves as much of a developer's attention as the pricing does.

Pricing clarity

2.0

Feature set

4.5

Ease of use

4.0

CCBill

Merchant of Record

B-

One of the longest-running high-risk processors in the United States, operating since 1998 and built around subscription billing for adult, dating, streaming and creator platforms. It will underwrite what almost nobody else will — but it publishes no rates, and its contract terms deserve a careful read.

Pricing clarity

1.5

Feature set

4.0

Ease of use

3.5