Building a SaaS was easy… payments, tax and compliance were not

So i’ve been building this product recently and honestly the coding part was the smoothest part of the whole journey

What actually slowed me down was everything around payments

Like:

1. setting up global payments
2. handling subscriptions vs one-time vs usage
3. figuring out taxes (vat, gst, all that mess)
4. dealing with compliance stuff i didn’t even know existed

Initially i tried setting things up with stripe, but onboarding and approvals took time and kind of delayed my launch more than expected

It started feeling like i was spending more time figuring out payments infra than actually building the product

That’s when i came across the whole idea of a Merchant of Record (MoR)

Basically instead of you handling payments + tax + compliance, the platform does it for you

I ended up trying out Dodo Payments and it simplified a lot of this:

1. Global payments just worked
2. Subscriptions + usage based billing in one place
3. Taxes handled without me digging into docs for hours

Still early, but it removed a lot of the non-building overhead

Curious how others are handling this

Are you managing payments + tax yourself or using something like MoR?