The cheapest published merchant of record rate in software, from a two-year-old Estonian startup
Creem is a merchant of record payments and billing platform for SaaS and digital product companies: it becomes the legal seller so it collects and remits VAT, GST, and sales tax across more than 50 countries with tax handling reaching 190-plus territories, and it provides recurring subscriptions with trials, dunning, and plan management, one-time payments, automatic software license key delivery, a customer portal, affiliate programs with automatic commission splits, and revenue splits between partners, all at a flat 3.9 percent plus 40 cents per successful transaction with no monthly fee, no setup fee, and no minimum.
Overview
Creem launched in 2024 out of Tallinn, built by Armitage Labs OU, with a proposition that is easy to state and hard to argue with: the incumbent merchants of record charge 5 percent plus 50 cents, and there is no structural reason they have to. Creem's flat 3.9 percent plus 40 cents undercuts Paddle and Lemon Squeezy by roughly 1.3 points in effective terms while providing the same core function, legal seller status with global tax collection and remittance, plus the things indie software companies actually need on top of it: license keys, a customer portal, affiliate commission splits, and a clean TypeScript SDK.
The company raised €1.8 million led by Practica Capital with support from Antler and angel investors, for a total of roughly $2.24M. Co-founder and CEO Gabriel Ferraz and his co-founder Alec had both been building payment systems before starting Creem, which shows in a product that gets the unglamorous parts right. By 2026 the platform reports more than 20,000 stores, over a thousand active merchants, and millions in monthly gross merchandise volume across hundreds of thousands of transactions a month.
Positioning is squarely at the AI-first and indie SaaS end of the market, the same segment Polar and Dodo Payments are fighting over, and the pitch there is simplicity. Where Polar's rate depends on which of four plans you are on plus surcharges for international cards, currency conversion, and payouts, Creem publishes one number and sticks to it. Where Paddle bundles more but charges more, Creem strips back to what a small software business needs. It is the least complicated pricing page in the category.
The honest counterweight is size. This is a company founded in 2024 with roughly $2.2M raised, acting as the legal seller for your revenue and filing tax returns on your behalf in dozens of jurisdictions. That is a materially different counterparty than a decade-old company with KKR on the cap table. The rate saving is real, the product is capable, and the risk is that you are trusting a young startup with the part of your business where failure is not recoverable. That trade is reasonable for a small business and questionable for one where a payments interruption would be existential.
Best for
Indie SaaS founders, AI-first startups, and small software companies selling globally who want merchant of record tax coverage at the lowest published rate in the category, with license keys, a customer portal, and affiliate splits included, and who are comfortable with a young vendor in exchange for saving roughly a point and a third on every transaction.
Not the right fit for
- Businesses where a payments outage or a vendor failure would be existential; Creem is a 2024-founded company with roughly $2.2M raised holding your revenue and filing your tax returns, and that risk is not priced away by a lower rate.
- Companies that need deep subscription mechanics such as complex proration rules, multi-item subscriptions, sophisticated usage metering, or hybrid consumption billing, which Creem does not document as first-class capabilities.
- Finance teams needing ASC 606 revenue recognition, deferred revenue schedules, multi-entity consolidation, or a general ledger integration, none of which exist here.
- B2B sellers closing negotiated annual contracts on their own paper with procurement review, since the invoice comes from Creem and the platform is built for self-serve checkout rather than a sales-led motion.
- Anyone selling physical goods, services, or regulated products, which sit outside the acceptable use policy of a company that carries legal liability for every sale it processes.
How it works
- 1
You sign up through the web portal, submit business and product details, and go through onboarding review. Because Creem takes on the legal liability for every sale, it screens what you are selling before you can transact, and the acceptable use policy is limited to software and digital products.
- 2
You create products in the dashboard or through the API. A product can be a one-time purchase or a recurring subscription with a trial, and license keys can be attached so they are generated and delivered automatically on payment.
- 3
Customers pay through Creem's hosted checkout. Creem determines the buyer's jurisdiction, applies the correct VAT, GST, or sales tax, and takes the payment as the legal seller. The invoice comes from Creem, and the registrations that make the tax collection legitimate belong to Creem.
- 4
Tax is remitted by Creem under its own registrations, with automatic VAT, GST, and sales tax collection and remittance covering more than 50 countries and tax handling described across 190-plus territories. You do not register for VAT anywhere, and you do not file returns.
- 5
The subscription then runs itself: automatic renewals, dunning on failed payments, trial conversion, and plan management, with a customer portal so subscribers change their own cards and cancel without emailing you. Webhooks fire on payment events so you can provision and deprovision accounts.
- 6
For growth, Creem includes affiliate programs with automatic commission splits and revenue splits between partners, both settled inside the platform rather than requiring a separate affiliate tool and a spreadsheet at month end.
Feature breakdown
25 features in 5 modulesMerchant of record and tax
The compliance transfer, at the lowest published price in the category.- Legal seller of record
- Creem contracts with your customer and issues the invoice, taking on the legal responsibility for the sale and everything that flows from it.
- Automatic VAT, GST, and sales tax collection
- Tax is calculated for the buyer's jurisdiction and collected at checkout, with automatic collection and remittance in more than 50 countries and handling described across 190-plus territories.
- Tax filing and remittance
- Creem files and pays the collected tax under its own registrations, which is the difference between a merchant of record and a tax calculator you still have to file behind.
- Chargeback and dispute handling
- Disputes are handled by Creem as the merchant rather than landing on your company as the seller.
- Global reach
- Sell to customers worldwide without registering an entity or a tax number in any of their countries.
Subscriptions and payments
Competent recurring billing without the surface area of an enterprise platform.- Recurring subscriptions
- Automatic renewals on your chosen billing cycle, with the subscription lifecycle managed by Creem rather than by your own scheduler.
- Free trials
- Trials convert automatically into paid subscriptions at the end of the trial window.
- Plan management
- Customers can move between plans, with upgrades and downgrades handled inside the subscription rather than requiring a cancel and re-subscribe.
- Dunning on failed payments
- Failed renewals are retried and chased automatically as part of the subscription engine, so involuntary churn is handled without a separate recovery tool.
- One-time payments
- Digital products can be sold outright alongside subscriptions from the same catalog and the same checkout.
- Hosted checkout
- A hosted checkout that localizes for the buyer and keeps card data entirely off your infrastructure.
- Customer portal
- Subscribers manage their own subscriptions and payment methods, which removes the most common category of billing support tickets.
Software delivery and growth
The pieces indie software businesses otherwise buy separately.- License keys
- Software license keys are generated and delivered automatically on purchase, with API endpoints for activation and validation, which desktop, plugin, and CLI developers would otherwise build themselves.
- Affiliate programs
- Run an affiliate program natively with automatic commission splits, settled inside the platform rather than reconciled by hand at month end.
- Revenue splits between partners
- Revenue can be split automatically between multiple parties on a sale, which matters for co-built products, marketplaces of two, and agency arrangements.
- Discount handling
- Promotional pricing can be applied at checkout for launches and campaigns.
Developer experience
Modern, TypeScript-first, and deliberately small.- REST API
- A documented REST API covering products, checkouts, subscriptions, customers, and license keys.
- TypeScript SDK
- An official TypeScript SDK, which is the language most of Creem's target market actually ships in.
- Next.js adapter
- A framework adapter for Next.js that wires checkout and webhook handling with very little code.
- Webhooks
- Payment and subscription events delivered as webhooks so your application can provision, upgrade, and revoke access in response.
- Test mode
- A separate test environment for building and verifying the flow before taking real money.
Commercial terms
The simplest pricing page in the category, and that is a feature.- One flat rate
- 3.9 percent plus 40 cents per successful transaction, with no tiers to compare and no plan fee to buy a better rate down.
- No monthly or setup fees
- An account with no sales costs nothing, so the downside of evaluating Creem is only your integration time.
- No minimum volume
- There is no floor, which matters for a product doing $500 a month that a platform with a $249 monthly minimum would price out entirely.
- Fees charged only on success
- The rate applies to successful transactions rather than to attempts, so failed payment retries do not compound your costs.
Use cases
4 documentedIndie developer selling a $29 per month tool
Currently on a merchant of record charging 5 percent plus 50 cents, doing $8,000 a month, and wondering whether the rate difference is worth a migration.
Moving from an effective 6.7 percent to 5.3 percent at that ticket size saves roughly $110 a month, which is real but has to be weighed against a re-authorization campaign across the entire subscriber base.
AI-first startup selling API credits and a monthly plan
Customers worldwide, no finance function, and a strong preference for spending zero hours on tax registration.
Creem takes the tax liability at the lowest published rate in the category, though a genuinely consumption-priced product should compare against platforms with first-class usage metering before committing.
Desktop app or plugin developer
One-time license sales to buyers in dozens of countries, needing key generation, activation, and VAT handled without building any of it.
License keys are issued and validated natively, tax is collected and remitted by Creem, and the developer never stands up a licensing server or files a foreign return.
Two founders splitting revenue on a co-built product
A product built jointly where every sale needs to pay out to two separate entities without a monthly reconciliation ritual.
Revenue splits are configured once and applied automatically per sale, and the affiliate program handles the promoters on top of that, replacing two spreadsheets with a setting.
Pricing
from 3.9% plus $0.40 per successful transaction, with no monthly feeSingle flat merchant of record fee per successful transaction, with no plan tiers, no monthly platform charge, no setup fee, and no minimum volume.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Standard | 3.9% + $0.40 per successful transaction |
There is only one tier. No feature is behind a higher plan and no monthly fee buys a better rate. |
Billing notes
- Work the effective rate. At $10,000 a month with a $50 average transaction, 200 charges cost 3.9 percent, which is $390, plus $80 in fixed fees, for $470 or an effective 4.7 percent. At $100,000 a month with the same ticket the arithmetic scales identically to $4,700, still 4.7 percent, because there is no volume break and no volume penalty either.
- Against Paddle and Lemon Squeezy at 5 percent plus 50 cents, which land at an effective 6.0 percent on the same assumptions, Creem saves 1.3 points. That is $130 a month at $10,000 of revenue and $1,300 a month at $100,000, which for a bootstrapped company is a meaningful line.
- Against Polar, the comparison is closer and depends on volume. Creem beats Polar's free Starter plan outright and beats Polar Pro at $20 a month until you are past a few thousand dollars in monthly revenue, after which Polar's 3.8 percent plus 40 cents edges ahead on base rate. But Polar then adds 1.5 percent on international cards, currency conversion, and payout fees, which Creem does not publish, so for a global seller Creem's flat number is often the lower real cost.
- Against a billing layer on your own processor, Creem is still more expensive. Chargebee Flow at 0.80 percent on top of Stripe at 2.9 percent plus 30 cents lands near 4.3 percent, so Creem's premium for taking away the entire tax compliance burden is roughly 0.4 points. That is the narrowest merchant of record premium in this batch and the strongest argument for the product.
- The fixed 40 cents is still the component that hurts small tickets. On a $50 sale it is 0.8 percent; on a $10 sale it is 4.0 percent, which lifts your effective rate to 7.9 percent. Low-priced products remain a bad fit for any merchant of record, Creem included.
- The pricing page states no setup fees, no monthly fees, and no hidden charges, and does not publish surcharges for international cards or currency conversion the way several competitors do. Confirm the specifics of currency handling and payout timing during onboarding, since these are the lines where the real cost of a low headline rate usually hides.
Value assessment: On price per unit of capability, Creem is the best deal in the merchant of record category and it is not particularly close. At an effective 4.7 percent it is 1.3 points below Paddle and Lemon Squeezy, and only about 0.4 points above assembling Chargebee Flow on your own Stripe account, which means the entire global tax compliance burden is transferring for less than half a point of revenue. It also bundles license keys, affiliates, and revenue splits that Paddle does not include at all. What you give up is maturity: no usage metering worth the name, no revenue recognition, thin B2B invoicing, and a two-year-old company as the legal seller of your product. If you are a small software business and the rate difference is material to you, this is a rational trade. If your revenue is large enough that a vendor failure would end the company, pay the extra 1.3 points somewhere older.
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- The lowest published merchant of record rate among serious competitors at 3.9 percent plus 40 cents, saving roughly 1.3 points against Paddle and Lemon Squeezy on identical assumptions.
- One flat rate with no tiers, no monthly fee, no setup fee, and no minimum, which makes the pricing page the easiest in the category to model against.
- Global tax collection and remittance covering more than 50 countries with handling described across 190-plus territories, which is the whole reason to use a merchant of record and it is not compromised by the low rate.
- License keys are generated, delivered, and validated natively, which is a real cost saving for desktop, plugin, and CLI developers.
- Affiliate programs with automatic commission splits and revenue splits between partners are included, replacing a separate affiliate platform and a monthly reconciliation.
- A modern developer surface with a TypeScript SDK and a Next.js adapter, matched to the stack most of its target market actually ships in.
- Real traction for a young company: more than 20,000 stores, over a thousand active merchants, and millions in monthly gross merchandise volume by 2026.
Limitations
- The company was founded in 2024 and has raised roughly $2.24M, so a very young business is acting as the legal seller of your product and filing tax on your behalf across dozens of jurisdictions.
- Usage-based and hybrid consumption billing are not documented as first-class capabilities, which rules Creem out for products priced by tokens, API calls, or compute.
- Subscription mechanics are competent rather than deep; complex proration rules, multi-item subscriptions, and sophisticated plan-change edge cases are not the platform's strength.
- No revenue recognition, no deferred revenue schedules, and no general ledger integration, so accounting beyond a bookkeeper reconciling payouts happens elsewhere.
- Quoting, contract workflow, and B2B invoicing for negotiated annual deals are thin to absent, so a sales-led motion is a poor fit.
- Currency conversion behavior and payout timing are not published as prominently as the headline rate, and those are exactly the lines where a low advertised number can quietly become a higher real one.
- Leaving is as painful as leaving any merchant of record: card credentials belong to Creem's relationship with your buyer, so an exit means re-authorizing every active subscriber.
- Support is a small team, with no published enterprise support tier or service level commitment.
Head-to-head comparisons
4 alternativesCreem vs Paddle
from 5% plus $0.50 per transaction, with no monthly feeCreem is 1.3 points cheaper in effective terms and bundles license keys, affiliates, and revenue splits that Paddle does not include. Paddle has a decade of tax filings, a $1.4B valuation and KKR behind it, a far deeper subscription engine, chargeback defense, and 24/7 billing support for your customers. If the rate difference is material to a bootstrapped business, Creem is the rational choice. If the entire point of hiring a merchant of record is having someone substantial standing behind the tax position, Paddle earns the premium.
Full Creem vs Paddle comparisonCreem vs Lemon Squeezy
from 5% plus $0.50 per transaction, with no monthly feeSame category, same shape, different trajectories. Lemon Squeezy is more finished and better documented, with email marketing and lead magnets that Creem does not attempt, but Stripe owns it and is building a migration path to Stripe Managed Payments. Creem is independent, 1.3 points cheaper, and building rather than winding down. Choose Lemon Squeezy for the more polished product today; choose Creem if independence and rate matter more than maturity.
Full Creem vs Lemon Squeezy comparisonCreem vs Polar
from $0 per month on Starter at 5% plus $0.50 per transactionBoth are young, developer-first, independent merchants of record. Polar is more capable, with genuine usage metering, prepaid credits, per-customer margin reporting, GitHub and Discord purchase benefits, and an open codebase, but its rate depends on which plan you buy and it surcharges international cards, currency conversion, and payouts. Creem publishes one number and keeps it. Take Polar if your pricing is consumption-based; take Creem if you sell straightforward subscriptions or licenses and want the simplest low rate available.
Full Creem vs Polar comparisonCreem vs Dodo Payments
from 4% plus $0.40 per domestic US transaction, with no monthly feeTwo young merchants of record chasing the same indie and AI-first buyer. Dodo is 4 percent plus 40 cents with an additional 0.5 percent on subscriptions, so it is slightly more expensive than Creem for recurring revenue, but it has far broader local payment method coverage including UPI and much stronger usage metering and SDK breadth. Creem is cheaper and simpler for card-based subscription and license sales. Pick Dodo if your buyers are in India or emerging markets or you meter usage; pick Creem otherwise.
Full Creem vs Dodo Payments comparisonImplementation & onboarding
- Setup time
- Hours to integrate, days for approval. The hosted checkout, TypeScript SDK, and Next.js adapter make a working paid flow genuinely quick, and the documentation is concise. Onboarding review comes first, because Creem is taking legal responsibility for what you sell.
- Learning curve
- Low. The product surface is deliberately small, which is its own kind of usability: there are fewer concepts to learn than in a full billing platform because there are fewer capabilities. The adjustment is the merchant of record accounting model, where revenue arrives as a payout from Creem rather than as customer payments, and your books have to reconcile the two.
- Onboarding
- Fully self-serve through the web portal with no sales call, supported by public documentation and a test environment. There is no implementation service and no assisted migration offering, so a move from another platform is your own project.
- Migration notes
- Moving in from another merchant of record means every active subscriber re-enters a card, because payment credentials belong to the outgoing vendor's legal relationship with the buyer and do not transfer. Budget for attrition and communicate the change well before it happens. Moving in from a raw Stripe integration is easier on the subscriber side only if Stripe agrees to a card data migration, which is possible between processors but not guaranteed and not something Creem can grant unilaterally. In either direction, export orders, subscriptions, customers, and license key records regularly so your historical data does not live only in a young vendor's database.
Platform, API & security
- Platforms
- Hosted checkoutCustomer portalREST APITypeScript SDKNext.js adapterWebhooksTest mode
- API
- A documented REST API covering products, checkouts, subscriptions, customers, and license keys, with an official TypeScript SDK, a Next.js adapter, and webhooks for payment and subscription events used to sync entitlements in your application.
- Compliance
- PCI DSS through the underlying payment infrastructureGDPRVAT, GST, and sales tax registration as merchant of record across 50-plus countries
- Data residency
- Not published as a configurable option. The operating entity, Armitage Labs OU, is registered in Estonia within the EU.
- SSO
- Not published as a seller-facing dashboard feature.
- Security notes
- Card data never reaches your infrastructure because Creem is the merchant, which keeps your business out of PCI scope. Dispute and fraud exposure sits with Creem as the legal seller. The most material security consideration is not technical: a company founded in 2024 with roughly $2.2M raised is holding customer funds in transit and carrying regulatory obligations, and that concentration of dependency deserves the same scrutiny as any single point of failure.
Support & resources
- Channels
- Email supportDocumentation and getting-started guidesDirect founder access typical of a small team
- Documentation
- Developer documentation at docs.creem.io covering getting started, products, subscriptions, license keys, webhooks, the TypeScript SDK, and the Next.js adapter.
- Community
- A growing presence in indie hacker and AI startup communities, with the founders publishing openly about payments architecture, but no large formal user forum.
Company
- Founded
- 2024
- Headquarters
- Tallinn, Estonia, operated by Armitage Labs OU
- Ownership
- Venture-backed, independent
- Founders
- Gabriel Ferraz, Alec
- Employees
- Small team, not publicly disclosed
- Funding
- Raised approximately €1.8 million in early funding led by Practica Capital with support from Antler and angel investors including Johan Pietilä and Martin Olofsson, for total funding of roughly $2.24M.
Funding history
| Round | Amount | Year | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-seed and seed | €1.8M | 2025 | Led by Practica Capital with Antler and angel participation; total raised across rounds reported at roughly $2.24M. |
Timeline
- 2024Launched by Armitage Labs OU out of Tallinn, Estonia, as a merchant of record alternative to Paddle and Lemon Squeezy at a lower published rate.
- 2025Raises approximately €1.8 million led by Practica Capital with Antler and angels participating, taking total funding to roughly $2.24M.
- 2025Adds license key generation and delivery, affiliate programs with automatic commission splits, and revenue splits between partners.
- 2026Reports more than 20,000 stores and over a thousand active merchants, processing millions in monthly gross merchandise volume across hundreds of thousands of transactions.
- 2026Holds the flat 3.9 percent plus 40 cents rate with no monthly or setup fees, positioning explicitly against Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, and Gumroad on cost.
Integrations
- TypeScript SDK
- Next.js adapter
- Webhooks to any internal system
- License key validation API
- Affiliate and revenue split configuration inside the platform
- Hosted checkout embeddable from any surface
Frequently asked questions
12 questionsWhat is Creem?
Creem is a merchant of record payments and billing platform for SaaS and digital product companies, launched in 2024 by Armitage Labs OU out of Tallinn, Estonia. It becomes the legal seller of your product, collects and remits VAT, GST, and sales tax globally, and provides subscriptions, one-time payments, license keys, a customer portal, and affiliate commission splits at a flat 3.9 percent plus 40 cents per successful transaction.
Is Creem really the merchant of record?
Yes. Creem contracts with your buyer, issues the invoice, and holds the tax registrations, which means the liability for calculating, collecting, filing, and remitting VAT, GST, and sales tax is Creem's rather than yours. It publishes automatic collection and remittance across more than 50 countries with tax handling reaching 190-plus territories, and this is the function you are buying, not a tax calculator you still have to file behind.
How much does Creem cost compared with Paddle or Lemon Squeezy?
Creem is 3.9 percent plus 40 cents against their 5 percent plus 50 cents. At a $50 average transaction that is an effective 4.7 percent versus 6.0 percent, so 1.3 points cheaper. On $10,000 of monthly revenue that saves about $130 a month; on $100,000 it saves about $1,300. There is no monthly fee, no setup fee, and no minimum on any of them, so the comparison really is that simple.
How does it compare with using Stripe plus a billing layer myself?
Roughly 4.7 percent against roughly 4.3 percent. Chargebee Flow at 0.80 percent on top of Stripe at 2.9 percent plus 30 cents lands near 4.3 percent at typical ticket sizes, which means Creem's premium for taking the entire global tax compliance burden off your company is about 0.4 points. That is the narrowest merchant of record premium among the vendors in this category and the single strongest argument for the product.
Does Creem handle usage-based or hybrid pricing?
Not meaningfully. Creem documents recurring subscriptions, trials, plan management, and one-time payments, but usage metering and consumption billing are not described as first-class capabilities. If your pricing is driven by tokens, API calls, compute, or storage, you should look at platforms built for metering instead, because retrofitting consumption billing onto a subscription-only platform is where billing systems go wrong.
What happens when a subscription payment fails?
Dunning is built into the subscription engine, so failed renewals are retried and chased automatically without you configuring a separate recovery tool. It is present rather than sophisticated: this is not a platform built around a machine-learning retry engine or configurable multi-campaign dunning, so if involuntary churn is your main revenue leak, compare it directly against a billing platform whose core selling point is recovery.
Does Creem do license keys?
Yes, and it is one of the better reasons to choose it. License keys are generated and delivered automatically on purchase and validated through the API, which means a desktop app, plugin, or CLI developer does not build and operate a licensing server. Combined with merchant of record tax handling, that covers most of what a small software business needs to sell a paid download worldwide.
Can I run an affiliate program or split revenue with a partner?
Both are included. Affiliate programs run natively with automatic commission splits, and revenue splits between partners are applied per sale rather than reconciled manually. For a co-built product or an agency arrangement, that replaces a spreadsheet and a monthly transfer. Neither Paddle nor most billing layers include affiliate management at all, so this is a genuine bundle advantage.
How risky is it to build on a company founded in 2024?
It is the main risk and it should not be waved away. Creem has raised roughly $2.24M and is acting as the legal seller of your product and filing tax returns on your behalf in dozens of jurisdictions. The mitigating evidence is real traction, with more than 20,000 stores and over a thousand active merchants processing millions monthly by 2026, founders with payments backgrounds, and institutional backing from Practica Capital and Antler. It is a reasonable trade for a small business saving 1.3 points, and a poor one if a payments interruption would end your company.
How hard is it to leave Creem, and is my card data portable?
As hard as leaving any merchant of record. Because Creem is the legal seller, stored payment credentials belong to its relationship with your buyer and cannot be handed to you or to another vendor. A migration means asking every active subscriber to re-enter a card, with real attrition. Export orders, subscriptions, customers, and license key records on a schedule so at least the historical record is yours regardless of what happens to the vendor.
Does it produce the exports my accountant needs?
At a basic level. You get order, subscription, and customer data through the dashboard and API, which is enough for a bookkeeper to reconcile the consolidated payout back to underlying sales. There is no revenue recognition module, no ASC 606 or IFRS 15 scheduling, no deferred revenue reporting, and no native general ledger connector, so anything past straightforward bookkeeping will be assembled outside the platform.
What can I sell through Creem?
Software and digital products: SaaS, downloadable applications, plugins, licenses, and digital goods. Physical products, services, and regulated categories fall outside what a merchant of record can underwrite, since Creem carries the legal liability for every sale. Onboarding includes a review of your business and product, so confirm eligibility before you spend time on the integration.
Editorial verdict
Creem is the price leader in the merchant of record category and the numbers are not marketing: an effective 4.7 percent against 6.0 percent for Paddle and Lemon Squeezy, and only about 0.4 points above assembling a billing layer on your own Stripe account. For that you get the full compliance transfer plus license keys, affiliate commission splits, and revenue splits that the incumbents either charge extra for or do not offer. The product is deliberately small, which is fine for straightforward subscription and license sales and disqualifying if you bill by consumption or need revenue recognition. The real question is counterparty risk. This is a 2024-founded Estonian company with roughly $2.2M raised acting as the legal seller of your product, and while it has genuine traction with more than 20,000 stores and a thousand active merchants, that is a different bet from a decade-old vendor with institutional money behind it. If you are a small software business and 1.3 points of revenue matters, take the trade and keep your data exported. If a payments outage would be existential, pay more for age.
Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.
Awards & badges
1 heldCreem holds 1 award from the SaaSTracker editorial program. Badges may be displayed by the vendor; each embed links back to this profile.
Best Value · Subscription Billing
“The cheapest published merchant of record rate in software, at 3.9 percent plus 40 cents with no monthly fee.”
<a href="https://saastracker.org/products/creem"><img src="https://saastracker.org/badges/embed/creem/best-value-summer-2026.svg" width="180" height="180" alt="Creem: Best Value, Subscription Billing. SaaSTracker Summer 2026 Awards." /></a>
