Stripe

Why Stripe is the default

Stripe is what almost every solopreneur ends up using, and it is the default for a reason. Once you wire it up, payments just work. Recurring billing, one-off invoices, international cards, refunds, disputes are all handled in a dashboard that does not feel like a 2007 banking portal.

The developer experience is the headline feature even if you are not a developer. The hosted Checkout and Payment Links work without any code, and almost every tool you might integrate Stripe with (newsletters, course platforms, schedulers, link-in-bio tools) already speaks Stripe natively.

What Stripe is not

It is not a tax solution. If you sell digital products to customers in the EU, UK, or the dozens of US states with marketplace facilitator laws, plain Stripe leaves you handling VAT, GST and sales tax yourself. Stripe Tax automates a lot of that for around $15/mo plus a small per-transaction fee, and it is worth it the moment you cross your first international threshold.

For digital products specifically, Lemon Squeezy or Paddle can be cheaper because they act as merchant of record and handle tax for you in exchange for a higher fee. But for services, subscriptions, or anything where the buyer is mostly in your home country, Stripe is hard to beat.

How most one-person businesses use it

• Invoices for client services (the hosted invoice page is genuinely good and gets paid faster than a PDF)
• Subscription billing for memberships, courses, recurring retainers
• Payment Links for one-off product or workshop sales: a single URL, no website needed
• Stripe Atlas for non-US founders who need a US LLC and US business banking

Verdict

If you take money on the internet, you almost certainly end up using Stripe. The question is whether you also need a layer above it (Lemon Squeezy for digital products, an invoicing tool like Bonsai for services with contracts attached). Stripe itself is rarely the wrong choice.