Stripe vs Lemon Squeezy

Overview of Stripe and Lemon Squeezy

Which is better, Stripe or Lemon Squeezy for adding payments into a Bubble app? As a quick overview, the core payment provider features are basically very similar. Both will allow you to do one-off purchases and both will allow you to do subscriptions. But let's first of all start on Stripe as you know they're the dominating force in this space and also technically Lemon Squeezy is much more than this. I don't want to undermine their company at all, I really like them but it's basically a wrapper with additional features around Stripe. They use Stripe but they're cool.

Stripe Integration with Bubble

Let's start with Stripe and one of the key things is that Bubble has got a plugin that they've developed that adds in a lot of deep integration in with your Stripe account. For example the fact that your Bubble app has got multiple versions, at the very least it's got a live version and the dev version, that the Bubble app will automatically mirror that into your Stripe test version and your Stripe live version. You also the integration goes deeper because Bubble add in additional fields on current users such as the Stripe ID and even going down into particular like subscription endpoints like you could say current users subscription and get a list of the subscriptions that they've currently got going. So on one hand Stripe is very quick to get going with Bubble.

Lemon Squeezy's Increasing Popularity

On the other hand and this is why I think Lemon Squeezy has been increasing in popularity because Stripe at its core was like a developer tool in the coded sense and then I've seen over the last few years that Stripe has been adding in many features such as like a hosted checkout and customer portals. That means that you don't have to be a developer to use many of their services. They're making it more no code friendly in many respects. Lemon Squeezy I think takes that to the next step. They've got a much clearer dashboard. A lot of the technical stuff is available but they basically keep it simple and make it very easy to get started with their platform.

Lemon Squeezy Features

And so like I said with Stripe you can add in checkouts. So you basically do it like a redirect. You bounce your user onto the Lemon Squeezy checkout. They complete their checkout. Any webhooks are sent very similar to Stripe so that you can update you know is the user subscribed or unsubscribed in your Bubble database. And all the transaction information of course goes through Lemon Squeezy.

Pricing Differences

One of the main differences is going to be pricing and this will of course vary depending on what part of the world you're in. But overall the impression I think you know we can see the differences here. Lemon Squeezy I mean again because they use Stripe you know everything on top of everything they run is basically on top of Stripe. Of course they have to add a surcharge onto that. So the transaction fees are higher on Lemon Squeezy but on the pricing page here they make they are making it clear that there are additional features.

Additional Features of Lemon Squeezy

So a pro plus in the Lemon Squeezy column is the fact that you've got email marketing and you've got affiliates built in to your payment provider. And that can really help you up in those early MVP stages because you're not having to pay for and integrate in two other services so that you can email different segmentations of your users depending on what plan they're on. Lemon Squeezy has got that all built in and then if you're launching an app that lends itself to like affiliate marketing then also Lemon Squeezy has got that built in. And there's a number of different software packages that I purchased which they all run through the Lemon Squeezy affiliate portal which means that me as someone who occasionally shares links can view all of the links that I'm sharing all in one go.

Tax Handling

And lastly and I see a lot of people talking about this on X/Twitter is that apparently again this depends on what part of the world you're in the implications for how you handle and you record and collect your tax is made easier with Lemon Squeezy than with Stripe. I get the impression that a lot of people find the Stripe tax side they're offering to be quite taxing whereas from what I've read Lemon Squeezy kind of takes care of it and so you can think of that as being part of the overall cost here.

Product and Service Restrictions

Last thing I saw a discussion yesterday on Twitter about basically there is a certain list of products and services that you can't sell through Lemon Squeezy. Of course you know both have got like the illegal things that you can't put you know you can't charge users for through the platform same with Stripe same with Lemon Squeezy. But before you invest in testing out your Bubble API connector, setting up your account, getting verified, all that sort of thing I would really make sure that you read through their T's and C's check the type of transactions that they would allow them to permit you to put through before you invest your time in them.

Conclusion

So there's my quick overview of Lemon Squeezy and Stripe. It's going to really vary depending on the individual personally I think it comes down to the transaction fee but then again I'd say that Lemon Squeezy may well be the easiest one to integrate in with Bubble even though Bubble has got its own Stripe plug-in because the Lemon Squeezy dashboard it just takes the technical level down in order to do basic things such as one-off purchases and subscriptions. Now if you think there's another payment provider you'd like me to comment on or you've got a comment to do with Stripe or Lemon Squeezy then please do leave a comment down below.