Stripe review (2026): the payment stack I run for SaaS and one-off sales

There’s a lot of Stripe content written from the documentation. This is written from running it — taking real money for both subscriptions and one-off work across my own projects — which surfaces the things the feature pages don’t. Stripe is the payment layer I default to, and for good reasons; it also has two specific gotchas that only show up once it’s live. Here’s the honest account.

Affiliate disclosure: the Stripe links below are affiliate links. The take is based on actually running Stripe for my own businesses, not the commission.

S

Stripe

★★★★★ 4.5/5

Best for: Control + lowest fees for subscriptions and one-offs Per-transaction % + fixed

The developer-favourite payment processor: the most flexible, usually the cheapest per transaction, with the deepest ecosystem. The catch is that you are the merchant of record, so EU VAT is your job — solvable, but it’s a layer you add, not one Stripe removes.

See Stripe

What it’s like to actually run

The reason Stripe is my default isn’t a single feature — it’s that one account cleanly handles the two things a solo actually sells: recurring revenue and one-off charges. What that looks like day to day:

• Subscriptions and one-offs together. I run SaaS subscriptions alongside one-off client charges in the same place. A detail I genuinely like for one-offs: instead of creating a product for every sale, you can pass the storefront’s product ID at checkout, so ad-hoc charges don’t clutter the catalogue.
• Weekly payouts to the company account. Predictable cash landing on a schedule, which makes the cash-flow side easier to plan.
• Flexible coupons. Any amount, duration, package or product type — promotions and bespoke pricing are trivial to set up.
• Verification was painless. KYC/onboarding was straightforward, not the slog it can be elsewhere.

For getting paid as a solo, this combination — control, low fees, subscriptions and one-offs in one place — is why it’s the default.

Gotcha 1: you own the VAT

The part nobody reads until quarter-end: Stripe processes the payment, it doesn’t become the seller. That makes you the merchant of record, so EU VAT lands on you — register for OSS, charge the right rate per country, keep location evidence, file the returns. It’s a solved problem, but solved by adding a layer: Stripe Tax or a dedicated VAT automation tool applies the rate at checkout and produces OSS-ready reports. If you’d rather not own any of that, that’s the whole case for a merchant-of-record processor instead — it takes the VAT burden at a higher fee.

Gotcha 2: webhooks across multiple projects

This one is from real, slightly painful experience. If you run several projects on a single Stripe account, the webhook events can cross wires — each project’s listener sees the others’ transactions and fires false signals (a sale in project A triggering logic in project B). It looks like a bug in your code, but it’s an attribution problem: the fix is scoping events properly per project so each listens only to its own. Once that’s set up, it’s rock-solid — but it’s worth knowing before you wire a portfolio onto one account and trust the signals.

To be fair, this is a one-time setup correction, not a recurring fault — but it’s the kind of thing that costs you an afternoon of confused debugging if you don’t know to look for it.

Who Stripe is for

• Solos who want control and the lowest per-transaction cost, and are fine owning VAT (with tooling).
• Anyone selling both subscriptions and one-offs — it does both cleanly in one account.
• Builders who want the deepest ecosystem and integrations.
• Less ideal for someone who wants VAT handled for them with zero setup — that’s the merchant-of-record trade-off, covered in the Stripe vs Paddle vs Lemon Squeezy comparison.

Verdict

Stripe is the payment stack I run, and for a solo who wants flexibility, low fees, and subscriptions plus one-offs in one place, it’s the default — with two clear-eyed caveats: you own EU VAT, and scope your webhooks per project if you run several. Handle those two, and it gets out of the way and just takes the money. For selling digital products specifically, weigh it against the merchant-of-record options first.