Paddle vs. Subscription Genius (discontinued)

I wouldn't recommend them to anybody because their support is getting worse and worse and their business processes require you to contact support whether you want to or not. You will be forced to contact support and then wait for days to get any meaningful response that's not a copy/pasted sentence from FAQ.

I would avoid [it] for any subscription management. Personally, we had a torrid experience with the product and company. The platform is dated and feels like an afterthought or a sideline project for Pape Ventures. They certainly don’t invest any time in developing the product and it feels like there is a real ‘Can’t do’ attitude from the management.

• 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.).

Incentivized

• Initial sales was strong.
• Their website looks the part.
• You feel like they are genuine.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Failed to deliver on promises.
• Auto renew function never worked from the start.
• Facebook Pixel Tracking never worked.
• Support failed to return calls.
• Support failed to return emails.
• Generally ignored.
• It ended up costing us double. I had to waste time chasing them to deliver on a product that never worked.
• Feels like a side project or afterthought.
• No new development time.
• Feels like it has been mothballed.

We tried using Stripe before Paddle, but it was a pain integrating it and it lacked the licensing. Paddle allows us just to add a payment button and don’t ever think about payment methods, we don’t have to make a separate button for card payments and another one for PayPal. Paddle does all this in their checkout process.

Incentivized

• We wanted to grow faster, which was possible once we integrate recurring payment gateway. And we've got Paddle to do that.

Incentivized

• We actually lost money and further time
• We ended up reverting back to manual subscription management