[mtlynch]

I sell an API as a service,[0] and I've been using RapidAPI for years. I've never been happy with them. They charge a 20% fee, and then there's another 3-5% fee for payments via PayPal. And they do many small transactions per month, so you pay PayPal's minimum fees over and over, making the total fees about 25-30%.

On top of that, their service is terrible. Customer support is rarely helpful, they frequently fail to bill my customers and just shrug it off, their dashboard takes 20+ seconds to load simple views. I could go on and on.

I welcome competitors in this space because I've been surprised at how few vendors offer what I'd expect to be not so hard a service.

The thing that kills this deal for me is that RestEasy isn't the merchant of record, so the API owner still has to figure out how to pay taxes in every state/country where they're liable for taxes.

The other thing that would make me nervous is that you're a brand new company, and you're a point of failure for my API. If RestEasy goes down, my service goes down.

RestEasy's site also currently has a lot of typos, which would also make me nervous about betting my uptime on this service.

I'm currently in the process of migrating to Paddle. They act as merchant of record, and their fees are 5%, though they require me to write a lot of my own custom code to integrate with their system.

[0] https://zestfuldata.com/

[j45]

Tying in paddle as merchant of record for all installs shouldn’t be that challenging no?

Stripe has connect as well to split but I’m not sure their merchant of record features are as mature.

[mtlynch]

>Tying in paddle as merchant of record for all installs shouldn’t be that challenging no?

It's not that hard, but I'm anticipating like 40 hours of work start to finish to get Paddle set up and write the integration.

The one positive thing I'll say about RapidAPI is that they made onboarding easy. They handle all of user signup, payments, etc. and they just forward your API requests from users. The only code I had to write is a few lines to populate a custom HTTP response header to tell RapidAPI how many units of my service the request consumed.

Paddle provides a lot less infrastructure, so I still have to write my own user signup flow. Paddle offers a JS library that does the heavy lifting for user signup, but I still have to integrate it with my website. And then they don't have the proxy model at all, so users talk directly to my backend, and my backend has to check with Paddle to see whether the user is valid or not. Then my backend has to both respond to the user and send a separate request to Paddle to add to the user's bill.

>Stripe has connect as well to split but I’m not sure their merchant of record features are as mature.

I didn't realize Stripe offered MoR at all, but it looks like they do now. My reading is that if I were to sell under RestEasy, then Stripe would indeed act as my MoR because I'm the "third-party seller":

>Is Stripe a merchant of record?

>Stripe is an MoR, but only for its Stripe Connect platform. With Stripe Connect, businesses can create platforms or marketplaces that process payments for third-party sellers. In this case, Stripe serves as the MoR, processing payments and assuming the associated responsibilities on behalf of the third-party sellers.

>However, when businesses use Stripe to process payments for regular direct transactions, the business itself remains the MoR while Stripe acts as a payment processor or payment gateway. This means that the business is responsible for transactional compliance, tax obligations, and managing refunds and chargebacks, while Stripe handles the technical aspects of transaction processing.

https://stripe.com/resources/more/merchant-of-record

[j45]

The clarification about stripe only being MoR in some cases (connect) is a time saver for me.

It’s good to know paddle is that comprehensive to implement. I think there were a few more providers I was looking at for MoR, I can share them if I locate them.

Thanks for taking the time to share it.

[conkeisterdoor]

Tangential, but I'm working on a personal recipe manager so I can easily search for my recipes and render them to PDF with a uniform style. But I decided that for v1, the database will just store ingredients as full strings, because I didn't want to write the code to parse them. I may just sign up for your service to do the parsing for me :) Thanks for sharing