Paddle (company)

Paddle is a developer of a payments and revenue delivery infrastructure platform for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. The company offers a full stack of software for payment-related applications and servants for users, offering infrastructure for companies that do not want to build out their own payment infrastructure. Paddle was founded in 2012 by CEO Christian Owens and Harrison Rose and is headquartered in London. Customers of the company have included Kaleido, Fortinet, Framer, Iconosquare, Renderforest, Matomo, MacPaw, Convertri, Proxyrack, and iMobie.

Paddle's platform offers software-as-a-service companies a single, all-in-one, payments-related technology stack. The platform has various layers in which users can choose the experience their customers can receive. For example, in the commerce layer, a company can use Paddle's platform to develop a preferred checkout experience to help convert inbound leads, scale sales-assisted invoicing to business accounts, and add subscription billing to expand a customer base.

The commerce layer of Paddle's platform includes the checkout, invoicing, and subscription features of the platform. Through the checkout experience, users are able to customize with overlay and inline options to keep the payment flow on-brand. It is fully localized into more than a dozen languages for better customer experiences; offers multiple payment methods; is globally compliant through Paddle's Tax and Compliance, so users do not have to register, charge, file, and remit sales taxes; and uses the platform's fraud protection component to ensure payments are protected.

Through subscriptions, users can develop a subscription infrastructure for automation prorated payments calculated for users and customers, allowing customers to pause accounts and easily reactivate them to reduce churn. They offer monthly fees or metered billing based on a user's chosen model and offer flexibility in creating plans and managing subscribers.

In the platform's finance layer, Paddle offers infrastructure for payments, tax and compliance, and fraud protection. Through the payments stack, Paddle allows users to accept payments from various providers, banks, and financial technology companies, including with access to various currencies and banking infrastructures. In tax and compliance, the platform works to keep users compliant with local tax laws, including registering, collecting, filing, and remitting sales taxes globally. And through the platform, Paddle helps companies combat fraud, with Paddle acting as the merchant in transactions and removing the worry around payments, chargebacks, fraudulent attempts to claim back revenue, and protect users from payment networks and providers in the case of them imposing bans and penalties.

In the data layer of Paddle's platform, the company offers reporting and upsell insights. Through the platform, users get real-time reporting of checkout, invoicing, and subscriptions and offers reliable real-time data to increase the reporting accuracy and keep companies up-to-date on its performance. This includes allowing users to develop and export reports from the Paddle dashboard for quick analysis and visualize their subscription revenue across different regions and time frames. And through the data layer, users can receive upsell insights and identify opportunities to grow their customer base, through groups from similar or the same business domains, who previously made purchases and increase revenues through the platform.