Mike Wakeling

@DFDSUKUpdates Hi any update on the 8.00 from Dover to Dunkirk?

Good morning, Kerry & Tanya here for the day. Due to the high winds, we are expecting delays throughout the day. Please keep an eye on our feeds for updates. ^KG ^TM

@webtoappdesign @PaddleHQ Hey, Mike here from the Product team at Paddle. Our Customer Portal is indeed on track for Q3. If you're up for it, I'd love to schedule some time to get feedback on what we have so far and give you a chance to ask any questions. My DMs are open!

@PaddleHQ What's the current status on the upcoming customer portal? I think it was announced for Q3, are you still on track there? I'm considering holding off on building my own due to it, but it'd be good to know how long I'll need to wait for yours, thanks :)

@stuster_m @PaddleHQ Hey Stuart, Mike from the Paddle Product team here. Sorry to hear you're having issues. Can you DM me with the exact steps you've been using to test your renewal discounts? Hopefully I can get this sorted for you.

@PaddleHQ Could really do with a response to our support emails. Trying to go live with billing but in sandbox all renewals are not working. The lack of docs & slow support make it painful to work with the system. Also how can we test discounts without waiting days for events?

@dickw0lff @PaddleHQ Mike from Paddle here - would love to chat to you about this if you’re up for it - DMs are open!

@PaddleHQ Do you guys have plans for offering customer portals?

@jekuer @PaddleHQ @lemonsqueezy @stripe Hi Jens, Mike from the Paddle product team here. Very happy you chose to go with us! I would love to schedule some time to chat with you about your experience in relation to some onboarding improvements we are working on at the moment. Shoot me a DM if you’re up for it.

As it is all set up now, as promised, the big @PaddleHQ , @lemonsqueezy , @stripe comparison for the #buildinpublic community. tldr; I went with a MoR and Paddle in the end. For my business case, being based in Europe/Germany while selling world-wide, a MoR makes things a lot easier. Within this category, Paddle was the only one offering all the necessary functionalities (mainly i18n). Let's go into details... MoR vs. Stripe I love Stripe. To me, they have the best interfaces and payment processes available! I mean, Paddle is also using Stripe under the hood 😉. The downside of stripe comes into play, when you are a #solopreneur with very limited time, while being based in a country like Germany. I have to fulfill a crazy amount of bureaucracy and follow regulations. This is not solely about getting taxation right, but also writing proper invoices and a lot of legal responsibilities. Mind that this not only applies if you are based in such a country, but also if you want to sell to customers there. If you are an #indiehacker selling to German customers and using simple Stripe, chances are very high that you're breaking the law. It usually does not get uncovered if you do B2C on a low level only - but as soon as you go B2B, you put yourself at big risk - well, if you are sitting at an Indonesian beach, German police will not find you 🙊. I often read that Stripe is so much cheaper. That's not generally true. If you go for all legally necessary steps, it is pretty much the same. It will get cheaper, if you are somewhere >20k MRR and hire yourself an accountant to do all the taxation and invoicing. But even this only works if your items are priced at >USD200 each. Below that, you also need to invest into tech billing processes. Long story short: If you go clean here, while not in a Wild West country (from a European perspective), MoR is the best choice for an indiehacker. If you grow big, it might change - do the calculation based on your case - there is no rule that fits all. 🤓 Paddle vs. Lemon Squeezy Dealing with #SaaS, those 2 are the ones you usually consider. They are both quite young and offer a similar feature set. While in the beginning, LS was way cheaper, they are more or less the same now. I first tended to go for LS, since their look and feel is way more modern. To be honest, Paddle dashboards and applications feel like Win95. Slow, bulky, no small screen support. 🙄 LS also offers a sexier checkout experience as well as extremely attractive add-ons like the option to integrate affiliate processes. I really understand why they are taking off and many people switch from Paddle to Lemon Squeezy. It seems to be a no-brainer and I really hope Paddle does its homework next year! However, LS is lacking things which are very fundamental to my business. This is mainly the option to translate stuff. They only support English. This might work for most of you, but breaks my user journey a little bit. Additionally, they are not that flexible when it comes to products and prices. I also did not find an option to use prices with tax included, which is mandatory for German B2C business. Yes, I could have built big workarounds, but as a MoR should make those things easier, not more complicated, this was a no-go. Bottom line: If you are, for example, US 🇺🇸 based and also only sell in the US, LS is the way to go! In all other cases, you need to check your specific case. If you are based in or sell to the EU 🇪🇺, I cannot recommend Lemon Squeezy at the moment. This basically already is the explanation, why I went for Paddle. But I also want to leave some feedback for Paddle here. Paddle offers very flexible processes and works (as far as I saw) for companies and business all around the globe. This is awesome. Their new API and technical tooling also is ... ok. Documentation is very good, but that's also the case for the other players. I already mentioned their extremely bad application design and technical architecture. However, what I would criticize the most, is the onboarding process. This comes right out of hell and imho is the main reason people are switching to LS ☝️. Let's start with customer support: This is fine. LS is faster, but 1-2 days at Paddle are ok for me. And people are very friendly! 🩷 It gets ridiculous when it comes to the overall process and each single step. At Lemon Squeezy, this was extremely straightforward. They did some standardizes KYC check and that's it. At Paddle, they claim it is a 3-step process. You validate your domain, your business, your identity. First it is about the domain. Seems easy, right? It is not, because it is not about domain approval. I am not sure what they check, but this went into a 10 steps back and forth process 😵‍💫, where they checked legal terms, the website, the product (or at least they claimed to do - I did not see any activity in the logs). What felt kinda funny was them looking for an existing business, which obviously was not there yet. Anyway, here's my point: This is totally fair (even still more complicated than LS), but it is a big issue that this is not communicated anywhere. This might be the case, because it does not seem to be standardized in any way. It felt like every new support agent did the process differently. This way, as a customer, you also have no idea where the process got stuck. You are completely lost, while at the same time, they have big problems with the resulting big pile of support request. Same for the further approval steps. I had a typo for the email address, which made the initial KYC email not getting delivered. However, I did not even know that they sent an email to this address. Again, no guidance on the process, no transparent status, nothing. I even do not see any information that I am verified, except for a small one-time notification - even this triggered another support request (is it really cheaper to have that huge support effort vs. 1 more line of code?). Cherry on the cake: After the verification of my SaaS business, I now need to request approval for doing business with SaaS instead of downloadable software - feels like a joke 🥴. As said, they are very friendly and it all turned out fine so far - but @paddle, this is a big lever to improve your business in 2 ways - reducing cost for support and not losing customers to LS 💸! My recommendation: Standardize the KYC process; make it fully transparent at your website; inform the user about his tasks and where the process is at the moment. You can keep it more restricted than LS, but making it user friendly should help a lot. So, here's the conclusion: Paddle does an extremely bad job when it comes to the user journey and onboarding. Lemon Squeezy is sexy, but lacks some important features for businesses outside the US. This made the choice easy for me. However, I really hope Paddle gets their issues fixed soon, as (as a new customer) I hope they are successful and stick around for some time 🤞. If they don't, I hope Lemon Squeezy puts some internationalization on their roadmap, so I have a legit backup. And no, Stripe, unfortunately, is no option (and also not cheaper) as long as I am not making very big money. That's it. I hope it helps somebody with their decision.

@pbteja1998 @PaddleHQ Hey Bhanu, Mike from the Paddle Product team here. Really glad to hear you are enjoying Billing! Would love to speak to you about some of the things we're thinking about at the moment, DMs are open!

Finally integrated new @PaddleHQ billing to SiteGPT.ai. Already got our first customer in this new setup. So everything works 🥳 Paddle Billing is a LOT better than Paddle Classic in every aspect. The only thing that @PaddleHQ is missing now is the customer-facing billing portal. Hope they will add that soon!

@flo_walther @PaddleHQ Hi Florian, you can remove a scheduled_change by setting it to null using the update subscription endpoint developer.paddle.com/api-reference/…

Does anyone know how to resume a canceled (but still active) subscription in @PaddleHQ? I use the new Paddle Billing.

@nite_ssh @PaddleHQ Hi Nitesh, I'm on the Product team at Paddle and would love to chat with you about your experience so far. DMs are open if you're up for it.

@LeanZubrezki @christianbowens @PaddleHQ @k__mountford Yeah, that'll be Classic then. That docs page will tell you what you need to know about enabling Billing alongside Classic. We are actively working on making migration possible right now, so that will be coming later.

@MikeWakeling @christianbowens @PaddleHQ @k__mountford No it’s older than that, the email that is sent comes with a button to get the receipt but not with it attached.

@christianbowens @PaddleHQ any chance you can send the invoice attached in the email instead of making the user click on View Invoice? A good number of companies have automations around invoices and having click to download instead of getting it attached breaks them 🙏

@LeanZubrezki @christianbowens @PaddleHQ @k__mountford If you created your Paddle account over a week ago, you'll be using Classic. You can find out more about Billing here: developer.paddle.com/changelog/2023…

@MikeWakeling @christianbowens @PaddleHQ @k__mountford I guess Classic? How can I verify and how can I upgrade to Billing?

@LeanZubrezki @christianbowens @PaddleHQ @k__mountford If you're talking about post-purchase invoices/receipts, it's a similar story. These are web-hosted in Classic, but in Billing are always attached as a pdf to the payment confirmation email.

@LeanZubrezki @christianbowens @PaddleHQ @k__mountford Hi Lean, are you using Paddle Classic, or our newly released Paddle Billing? With Classic, all invoices are web-hosted. With Billing, we don't attach the first invoice as the customer needs to accept our T&Cs first. All invoices after that will be attached as a pdf to the email.

@hermanschutte @euboid Hey Herman, Mike here from the Product team at Paddle. Paddle Billing doesn't support this yet, but it will be coming soon!

@euboid Wonder if it will support upgrading during a trial period. That's been the only headache for me with Paddle. Have definitely lost revenue because of this.

Paddle just got *really* good — SaaS pricing that just works. No more separate plans for each tier — Create addons easily (finally!!) — Flexible coupon structures — Invoices as a payment option for subscriptions My wishlist for the last year delivered in one fell swoop.

@abhagsain @christianbowens @PaddleHQ Hi Anurag, Mike here from the Product team at Paddle. No ETA on this yet, but it would be great to learn more about what you'd expect from a portal. My DMs are open!

@christianbowens @PaddleHQ Great. Any ETA? Can I DM you or your team if a case will be handled by the portal or we'd need to implement it ourselves?

Today we released the all new Paddle Billing. Hundreds of new features, improvements and updates wrapped up in a completely new set of APIs for developers.

@thomasfals @johnrushx @unicornplatform @PaddleHQ Hi Thomas, Mike here from the Product team at Paddle. This is something we are actively working on, it would be great to hear more about what you’d like to see. My DMs are open!

@johnrushx @unicornplatform @PaddleHQ The lack of insights with @PaddleHQ is extremely frustrating. Hopefully this will be addressed with the new release. So much room for improvement.

This seems very suspicious, lot's of failed payments for our SaaS (@unicornplatform ) What's wrong @PaddleHQ ? it's too bad I can't see the actual error messages on why the payment has failed

@greateranglia what trains are expected to run from South Woodham Ferrers to Wickford in the morning?

@HelloFreshUK Are you having issues with your services? I can log in but can barely get anything to load. Everything that does load seems to be incorrect (e.g. it doesn't think I'm on a plan)

@AH_Michael Hey Michael... random question - Any idea what the name/brand of the blue wall color in your loft? We're having issues agreeing on a color and both agreed we liked it while watching Off Topic!

@CenterParcsUK I'm trying to book an activity online and keep getting the error "Forward confirmation page url is not provided" after entering my card - any idea what's going on?

Timing is a little off on this one after yesterday's unexpected email but here goes... I've got 5 Boost Codes worth 20,000 Points each thanks to @Blutailedferret RETWEET TO ENTER 5 WINNERS 24 HOURS Please continue to share yesterday's boost codes in comments for others