Comparing Lemon Squeezy and Stripe for Bubble.io Developers
Here's the quick lowdown of why Lemon Squeezy may be a good Stripe alternative for Bubble app builders. I'm going to do a quick comparison in this video and then right after I'm going to be recording some more videos getting into the technical side. Well actually quite easy it is to integrate Lemon Squeezy in with Bubble and how it may even be simpler to add Lemon Squeezy to Bubble than it is to add Stripe to Bubble.
Stripe: The Built-in Payment Gateway for Bubble.io
Let's just do a quick comparison. We're actually going to begin with Stripe. So Stripe is the payment gateway that's built and baked into Bubble. We have got an official plugin that's the Bubble team that developed and Stripe is great. We use Stripe and they've got a pricing structure which is fairly simple. There's kind of a lot of extra cost but you can find them all on the website if you know where to hunt and yeah you're looking at these foundies which is sort of the same ballpark as PayPal maybe a little bit cheaper depending on where you are in the world.
Advantages of Stripe
And Stripe has got the advantage of the hosted checkout it's very recognizable they must have well they will have plunged a lot of money into that to really optimize it for conversion. Lemon Squeezy has got a very nice checkout as well but I'm just focusing on Stripe for a moment.
Stripe Documentation and API Complexity
Now the Stripe documentation and the Stripe API I would say that with flexibility comes complexity and so there are things that you feel like it should be quite simple to do like subscription plan IDs in Bubble which we've covered in a previous video. There are ways to do it but I think we'll see that Lemon Squeezy actually simplifies a lot of the process and so maybe even quicker to add into Bubble than adding in Stripe.
Comparing Lemon Squeezy Pricing
Let's just contrast the pricing of Lemon Squeezy for a moment because they are different which is Lemon Squeezy has more of like a it's got a higher percentage but they're saying that there's no additional costs on that apart from very kind of fringe examples. So you're looking at it costing you more of a percentage take of each transaction but it's more all-encompassing this figure compared to Stripe.
Reasons to Consider Lemon Squeezy
There are a couple of reasons that I've read online why people are preferring Lemon Squeezy. I think depending on your location it might be easier to handle taxes with Lemon Squeezy than using Stripe or at least it may be more affordable to handle taxes especially different. I'm in the UK I barely understand it different states in America have got different levels of sales tax. My impression is that Lemon Squeezy goes a lot further with the base package than Stripe does with helping you handle those things.
Accessibility and Country Support
There's also the whole thing with different countries being supported by these different payment providers and then my understanding is that Lemon Squeezy may be accessible and therefore the only option in some countries when compared to Stripe.
Comparing API Documentation
So that's a quick lowdown and I'm just going to contrast two documents by going into the API documentation here which is that like Lemon Squeezy you can handle products you've got shopping carts you've got product variants you've got subscriptions basically there are many of the things that you'd also be looking to Stripe to include but you can tell just by looking at the documentation here and then if I contrast that with with Stripe for API reference like I say with flexibility comes complexity which is that Stripe's documentation is just huge and there are features that you can get with Stripe that you can't get with Lemon Squeezy but in the video so I'm going to record after this you and we will be looking at basically how Lemon Squeezy probably ticks a lot of the boxes.
Conclusion: Exploring Lemon Squeezy as a Stripe Alternative
If you're looking for something simpler and you can afford that slightly higher percentage then it really is worth exploring Lemon Squeezy and we'll put a link in the description for you to be able to sign up and have a go with the Lemon Squeezy dashboard.