Lemon Squeezy alternatives

The cost nobody puts in the table

Lemon Squeezy is a merchant of record. Legally they are the seller. EU VAT registration, rate lookups per country, filings, invoices and the liability if any of it is wrong are theirs, not yours.

Every self-hosted option below hands all of that back to you. That is not a footnote — for a seller with EU customers it is the single largest hidden line item in leaving, and it does not show up as a percentage anywhere.

The 50¢ is the part worth checking

The flat per-transaction component is invisible at high prices and brutal at low ones. Same 5% + 50¢ fee, very different effective rates:

The alternatives, grouped by what you actually want

If you want to stay hands-off — another merchant of record

If you want off the percentage — and are willing to own the tax

The combination most people miss

You do not have to choose. Keep a merchant of record in front for the tax, and put a flat-fee licensing server behind it for the keys and updates. You pay 5% on revenue and a fixed annual fee, and the licence data and customer relationship live on your own infrastructure rather than the platform's.

That is worth knowing because it is also the answer to the third reason people leave — platform risk. If your worry is that the checkout provider changes direction, the fix is not to leave it. It is to stop letting it be the only place your licence data exists, so that switching later is a checkout change rather than a migration.

Lemon Squeezy and LicensorPro, feature by feature

LicensorPro is one of the alternatives above, and the one we make, so here is the full side-by-side. Lemon Squeezy's column comes from its own public pages, read 17 September 2026; we didn't sign up to test it. Ours is checked against the LicensorPro 2.5.1 build customers download. The longer write-up is on the Lemon Squeezy comparison page.

What only one of them does

Where Lemon Squeezy is still the right answer

• You sell into the EU and do not want to register for VAT. This is the strongest reason and it is worth more than 5% to most solo sellers.
• Your average order is over about $30. The 50¢ stops mattering and 5% is genuinely competitive.
• You are not a software seller. If you sell templates or courses, the licensing half of this page is irrelevant and there is little reason to move.
• You would be replacing it with two things. A store plus a licensing server plus a tax accountant is three suppliers where you had one. Count the total, including your own time.

Moving off

1. Subscriptions are the hard part. Recurring customers usually cannot be transferred between merchants of record — the payment mandate belongs to the old seller. Expect to ask people to re-subscribe, and expect to lose a share of them.
2. Export customers and licence keys while the account is live. Not after.
3. Sort the VAT position before the first sale on the new setup, not after. If you are becoming the merchant of record you may need to register somewhere, and that is not a same-week job.
4. Keep old download and licence endpoints answering for at least one renewal cycle.

Pricing a different vendor?

These five pages cover the same ground for the other platforms plugin authors actually leave. The honest answer differs by vendor, so they do not all reach the same conclusion.

• Freemius alternatives — the 7.0% WordPress rate, and who actually beats it.
• Easy Digital Downloads alternatives — nobody leaves over fees — they leave over the pass price.
• LicenseSpring alternatives — a licensing API, not a store — watch the request limit.
• Gumroad alternatives — 10% or 30%, but the fee is the second question.