Stripe onboards sellers in roughly 46 countries. If you build from Turkey, Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Morocco or dozens of other countries, every "just connect Stripe" tutorial quietly assumes a door you cannot open. I ran into this wall shipping my own SaaS from Turkey. Here is the actual decision tree, with trade-offs.
Option 1: Merchant of Record (the one that usually wins)
A Merchant of Record (MoR) — Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Polar — becomes the legal seller of your product. That changes three things at once:
- They handle VAT / sales tax registration and remittance globally. You never file a EU VAT return.
- They onboard sellers from many countries Stripe does not support. You get paid out to your local bank or Payoneer/Wise.
- Chargebacks and card compliance are their problem, not yours.
The cost: roughly 5% + $0.50 per transaction (varies by provider), noticeably more than raw Stripe's ~2.9%. That margin buys you a tax compliance department. For a solo dev selling globally from an unsupported country, this is almost always the right trade.
Differences in practice: Paddle has the strictest onboarding review (expect a website audit before approval). Lemon Squeezy is the fastest to start. Polar is developer-first (API/SDK-centric, open source) and the newest of the three.
Option 2: Local payment providers
Every country has domestic PSPs (iyzico and PayTR in Turkey, Paystack and Flutterwave in Nigeria, etc.). They work well for selling to your own market in local currency — but they usually require a registered local company, and they do not solve global card acceptance or foreign tax compliance. Use them for domestic revenue, not as your global rail.
Option 3: Foreign entity + Stripe
A Delaware LLC or UK Ltd plus a Stripe-Atlas-style setup gives you full Stripe access. Real costs: formation, registered agent, annual franchise tax, accounting — typically several hundred dollars per year before an accountant touches it, plus US/UK filing obligations. It makes sense once revenue justifies the overhead. As your first move with $0 revenue, it is premature optimization.
Option 4: Invoices and bank transfer
Unsexy, works everywhere, zero setup. For your first handful of B2B customers, a PDF invoice and a wire transfer is a completely legitimate payment stack. Do not build payment infrastructure before you have someone trying to pay you.
The order that makes sense
- First customers: invoice + transfer.
- Going self-serve globally: Merchant of Record.
- Domestic volume: add a local PSP.
- Real revenue, real accountant: consider the foreign entity.
Disclosure: after shipping my own product on this stack (Polar as MoR, Firebase auth, credit-based billing, fal.ai generation), I packaged the whole wiring as a starter — checkout, signed webhooks, atomic credit ledger, rate limiting. If you want to skip that plumbing it is $99 here: https://cengokurtoglu.gumroad.com/l/epwlkh — the honest "what is NOT included" list is on the page. If Stripe works in your country, use a Stripe boilerplate instead; this exists for the rest of us.
Top comments (1)
The third MoR bullet is the one I would split. A founder in an Indie Hackers thread last night went and read Polar's terms after a discussion about disputes, and reported that the chargeback passes back to him in full, Polar keeps its fee on the reversed sale, and a $15 per-dispute charge comes out of balance whatever the outcome. Card compliance genuinely is the MoR's problem, because the disputes count against their merchant account with the card networks rather than yours, so your dispute ratio is not your exposure. The money is often still yours, and that is a different thing. Worth checking the exact wording in your provider's terms since it varies, and worth separating those two halves here, because a reader in an unsupported country choosing MoR partly to avoid chargeback risk is choosing on the wrong half.