Stripe alternatives for B2B SaaS teams

What Stripe costs today, as the baseline

The Stripe pricing page shows 2.9% + 30¢ for each successful domestic card transaction, with 1.5% added for international cards and 1% when currency conversion is needed. Billing is a separate line: 0.7% of Billing volume on pay as you go, or from $620 a month on a one-year contract. Stripe Tax Complete starts at $90 a month, and Managed Payments, its merchant-of-record product, adds 3.5% per successful transaction on top of Payments fees. The full side-by-side with Chargebee is on the Stripe vs Chargebee page; this page is about leaving.

Three volumes used throughout

Every cost figure below uses the same basket: $20,000 a month in 200 domestic card payments of $100, $100,000 in 400 payments of $250, and $500,000 in 1,000 payments of $500. Stripe's own bill for each basket, with Billing on pay as you go and Tax Complete at its starting price, is built like this:

• $20,000: processing 2.9% × $20,000 = $580, plus 200 × $0.30 = $60, so $640; Billing 0.7% × $20,000 = $140; Tax Complete $90. Total $870.
• $100,000: processing $2,900 + 400 × $0.30 ($120) = $3,020; Billing $700; Tax Complete $90. Total $3,810.
• $500,000: processing $14,500 + 1,000 × $0.30 ($300) = $14,800; Billing $3,500; Tax Complete $90. Total $18,390.

The five alternatives, one by one

1. Chargebee: swap the billing brain, keep the card rails

Chargebee's pricing page sells Flow as a slider labelled Monthly Invoicing Volume, running from $0 to $500K. It shows $0 + 0.80% next to $99 + 0.65% with a $66K breakeven, and says Flow includes 100M usage events a month and plugs into 40+ payment gateways. Enterprise is a demo request. No card rate appears anywhere, because the gateway you connect sets it.

• What it replaces: subscriptions, invoices, dunning, usage metering and the customer portal. Flow lists smart dunning, Net-D payment terms, offline payments by check and bank transfer, and a sales-tax line.
• What it does not replace: your processor. With Stripe underneath, the combined cost of the three baskets is $640 + $160 = $800, $3,020 + $749 = $3,769 and $14,800 + $3,349 = $18,149, using the cheaper Flow option at each size, before tax filing.
• What Flow leaves out: account hierarchy, multi-entity management, contract terms and SAML. They belong to Enterprise, and the feature table marks several with a dollar sign.

Switching effort from Stripe: low to moderate. Chargebee's migration guide keeps Stripe as the gateway, so no card data has to travel. You rebuild plans, add-ons and coupons in Chargebee, send new signups there first, and have Chargebee's team import subscriptions into a test site before the live cut. Only subscription and customer details and current-term invoices come across, so older invoices stay in Stripe and need an archive plan. The part to budget for is engineering time: every webhook handler that listens for Stripe subscription events has to listen to Chargebee instead.

2. Paddle: hand the seller role to someone else

Paddle's pricing page lists one rate, 5% + 50¢ per transaction, and says there are no monthly fees, migration fees or hidden extras. The same page positions Paddle as your Merchant of Record and lists global tax and regulatory compliance, fraud protection, chargebacks and buyer support as part of the deal. It also promises migration without putting subscribers at risk.

Here is how the fee compares with building the same outcome on Stripe:

• $20,000 in 200 payments: Paddle is 5% × $20,000 = $1,000 plus 200 × $0.50 = $100, so $1,100. Stripe's stack above is $870, and Stripe Managed Payments (2.9% + 3.5% = 6.4%) is 6.4% × $20,000 = $1,280 plus $60, so $1,340 before any Billing fee.
• $100,000 in 400 payments: Paddle is $5,000 + 400 × $0.50 ($200) = $5,200. Stripe's stack is $3,810, and Managed Payments is $6,400 + $120 = $6,520.
• $500,000 in 1,000 payments: Paddle is $25,000 + 1,000 × $0.50 ($500) = $25,500. Stripe's stack is $18,390, and Managed Payments is $32,000 + $300 = $32,300.

Paddle costs $230, $1,390 and $7,110 a month more than the do-it-yourself Stripe stack at those sizes, and that gap is the price of not registering for taxes yourself. It costs $240, $1,320 and $6,800 less than Stripe's own merchant-of-record fee, though the Stripe figure leaves out any Billing charge that may apply on top.

Switching effort from Stripe: high. This is a change of seller, not a change of vendor. Your customers' receipts will carry a different legal seller, so ask your largest accounts' procurement teams whether they will accept it before you commit. Cards can only move if Paddle gives Stripe its PCI attestation and a PGP key; the Stripe export covers customers, cards, emails and metadata, and nothing else. Subscriptions are rebuilt in Paddle, usually in cohorts, with new customers first and existing subscribers staying on Stripe until their cohort moves, so plan for a long stretch of dual running. The Stripe vs Paddle comparison covers the product differences, and Paddle vs Lemon Squeezy is the next stop if you are weighing other sellers of record.

3. Adyen: enterprise acquiring with the markup shown separately

The Adyen pricing page explains its model in one sentence: for each transaction you pay a fixed processing fee plus a fee set by the payment method. The fixed fee shown is $0.13, there is no setup fee or monthly fee, and Adyen's other products are priced separately. Mastercard is listed at Interchange+ plus 0.60%, American Express at 3.95%, iDEAL at €0.22, and Apple Pay as defined by the card used. Adyen says its Interchange++ approach passes the variable interchange fee straight through to you.

Monthly basket	Fixed fee at $0.13	0.60% on Mastercard	Interchange itself
$20,000, 200 payments	200 × $0.13 = $26	0.60% × $20,000 = $120	Not on the page
$100,000, 400 payments	400 × $0.13 = $52	0.60% × $100,000 = $600	Not on the page
$500,000, 1,000 payments	1,000 × $0.13 = $130	0.60% × $500,000 = $3,000	Not on the page

That table is deliberately incomplete. Adyen's page shows two parts of the bill and leaves the third, interchange, to your card mix and region, so the all-in comparison with Stripe's 2.9% + 30¢ needs a quote built on your own transaction file. There is no subscription engine on this page either; if you want plans, proration and dunning, Chargebee lists Adyen among its gateways.

Switching effort from Stripe: moderate to high, mostly paperwork. Stripe will export card data to another PCI DSS Level 1 processor once it has that processor's attestation of compliance and a PGP public key of at least 4,096 bits hosted over HTTPS, so the first step is asking Adyen's onboarding team to supply both. Your own integration work is real, because every Stripe Checkout, Elements and webhook touchpoint has to be rebuilt against the single integration Adyen describes on its page. Nothing about the Stripe side expires: you can keep reading Stripe's Dashboard and API for history as long as you leave the account open.

4. Mollie: euro-first pricing, split by card type

The Mollie pricing page promises no minimum costs, no lock-in contracts and no hidden fees, with payment only on successful transactions. Cards are split three ways, all in euros:

• European Economic Area consumer cards: 1.80% + €0.25.
• European Economic Area commercial cards: 2.90% + €0.25.
• Cards issued outside the EEA: 3.25% + €0.25.

The commercial-card line matters for B2B, because company cards are what many invoice-paying customers use. On a basket of €20,000 in 200 payments, EEA consumer cards cost 1.80% × €20,000 = €360 plus 200 × €0.25 = €50, so €410. Commercial cards cost 2.90% × €20,000 = €580 plus €50, so €630, and non-EEA cards cost €650 + €50 = €700. At €100,000 in 400 payments the same three lines come to €1,900, €3,000 and €3,350. Mollie says merchants processing more than €100,000 a month can ask for volume pricing, so a €500,000 basket (€9,250, €14,750 or €16,500 at list rates, from 1,000 × €0.25 = €250 plus the percentage) is a ceiling, not a quote.

One more charge applies to smaller merchants: if you process less than €500,000 a year, Mollie charges €0.25 for each payout after the fifth in a month. The page lists no subscription or invoicing product, so Mollie is a processor alone; Chargebee names it as a supported gateway. Mollie also describes a platform product for SaaS businesses and marketplaces that want to embed payments in their own product, which is a different purchase from collecting your own subscription revenue.

Switching effort from Stripe: moderate. It is the same card-export route as Adyen: Mollie must be able to receive Stripe's encrypted JSON export under PCI rules. The practical difference is currency. If you invoice in US dollars to US customers, Mollie's euro price list will not help you, so confirm which currencies and countries your account would settle before moving anything.

5. Braintree: PayPal-owned processing, rates not readable

Braintree is a PayPal-owned processor, and Chargebee names it among its 40+ gateways. We could not read rates from Braintree's own pages, so this section states no price: the pages we loaded returned errors or no pricing text. Ask Braintree for its rate card in writing, and ask the same questions you would put to any processor, namely the card rate by region, the fee per dispute, the payout schedule and whether PayPal and Venmo acceptance is billed on a separate line.

Switching effort from Stripe: moderate. Cards travel under the same rules as any Stripe export: the receiving processor needs a PCI DSS Level 1 attestation and a PGP key. Checkout code, webhook handlers and refund flows are rewritten. A team that adds Chargebee on top also gets a gateway-agnostic subscription record, which turns a later move away from Braintree into a gateway change rather than a rebuild.

Choose by the reason you are leaving

What actually moves when you leave Stripe

Stripe's data export guide sets the boundaries for every option above. Stripe prepares an encrypted JSON file with customers' card details, email addresses and metadata, and arranges the transfer with the new processor. It does not export payment history, subscriptions or other objects, so you pull those through the API or Dashboard yourself, and Stripe says you can keep using the Dashboard and API after you stop processing as long as you leave the account open. Credentials saved through Link are excluded and cannot be moved between processors.

1. Write down which of your customers pay by card, bank debit or invoice. Only card details are exportable, so the other groups need their own plan.
2. Ask the new vendor for its PCI attestation and PGP key and send both to Stripe's migrations team before you promise a cutover date.
3. Build the new checkout and send new customers to it first, leaving existing customers on Stripe until the card import completes.
4. Rebuild subscriptions in the new system with matching billing anchors so no one is charged twice or skipped.
5. Move webhooks and customer messages together, and switch off Stripe's failed-payment emails for subscriptions that no longer live there.
6. Keep the Stripe account open through your next financial close, since invoice history and tax reports stay there.

FAQ

Which Stripe alternative is cheapest for B2B SaaS?

It depends on which slice you replace. For billing logic alone, Chargebee's $0 + 0.80% option costs $160 at $20,000 a month against $140 for Stripe Billing's 0.7%, so it is not cheaper there; at $500,000 a month the $99 + 0.65% option costs $3,349 against $3,500. Paddle costs more than a Stripe stack on every basket here because it also carries tax liability.

Can I leave Stripe and keep my customers' saved cards?

Yes for cards, with conditions. Stripe will transfer them only to a processor that holds PCI DSS Level 1 compliance and can supply an attestation and a 4,096-bit PGP key, and Link credentials stay behind. Subscriptions and payment history do not travel, which is why the migration plan above rebuilds them.

Is Paddle better than Stripe Managed Payments?

On list price at business-to-business payment sizes, Paddle's 5% + 50¢ is lower than Managed Payments' 2.9% + 30¢ plus 3.5%, as the baskets above show. Managed Payments wins on effort, since you stay inside the Stripe account you already run.

Do Adyen, Mollie or Braintree include subscription billing?

Not on the pages we read. Adyen says its other products are priced separately, Mollie's page covers payments only, and Braintree's rates could not be read. Chargebee lists all three among its gateways, so the usual pairing is a processor plus a billing layer.

Does Mollie charge less for business cards?

No, it charges more. Mollie lists EEA commercial cards at 2.90% + €0.25 against 1.80% + €0.25 for EEA consumer cards, so a customer base that pays with company cards should be modeled on the higher line.