Integrated payments: Top 3 solutions for SaaS and app companies

Accepting payments shouldn’t come with a hidden tax on your team’s time. For most SaaS and app companies, payments are a tangled mess of regulatory requirements, tax calculations, and fraud detection, taking your focus away from what really matters: building your product. 

Integrated payments cut through that mess, allowing you to connect your payment processor directly to your platform. That means no more manual work, a massive reduction in errors, and a checkout experience customers want to come back to.

What are integrated payments?

Integrated payments let you manage billing, tax, and compliance all in one platform. Even when checkout takes place on a hosted page under your domain, everything (payment processing, confirmation) stays connected via the same system. That means no more third-party plugins and fewer moving parts. 

This creates a stronger customer experience and gives you a real-time view of transactions, renewals, and refunds, all in one clear place. 

Examples of integrated payment companies

• Paddle: As a merchant of record (MoR), Paddle doesn’t just cover payment operations. It becomes your Merchant of Record for all transactions. That means Paddle assumes liability for compliance, handles sales tax calculations and remittance across 200+ markets, navigates chargebacks, and manages fraud prevention. You get integrated payments plus an entire revenue operations stack. 
• Adyen: A payment processor made for high-volume enterprises. Adyen offers extensive payment coverage, powerful APIs, and unified commerce capabilities. To unlock those features though, you’ll need an in-house engineering and compliance team. Adyen brings the infrastructure. You’re responsible for tax, legal, and regulatory expertise for each market you operate in.
• PayPal (Braintree): Developer-friendly payment gateway with strong brand recognition. Supports popular payment methods like PayPal, Venmo, and major credit cards. Though the API is easy to integrate with, you’ll still have to handle compliance, subscription billing logic, fraud management, and tax calculations on your own. 

Integrated payments benefits

Integrated payment processors let your users complete their purchases without ever leaving your platform, creating a stronger user experience for both businesses and customers. 

H3 - Benefits for SaaS and app businesses

The benefits integrated payment systems bring for SaaS and app businesses include: 

• Conversion optimization through localized payments: Customers see familiar payment methods like credit cards, digital wallets, Apple Pay, building confidence and increasing checkout conversion rates.
• Real-time revenue visibility: Payment data flows directly into your platform, giving you accurate reporting on revenue, churn, and customer lifetime value. 
• Reduced operational overhead: The less time your team spends on manual transaction recording, payment status tracking, and building custom tax logic, the more resources you have for product innovation. Iconosquare reduced their billing costs by 15% after consolidating their payment tooling. 

Benefits for customers

Integrated payment system benefits extend to customers as well: 

• Improved security: Stronger protection for credit card and personally identifiable information (PII) keeps customer data secure.
• Flexibility: Integrated payment systems provide support for multiple payment methods (e.g., credit/debit cards, digital wallets). 
• More confidence with the checkout process: Since payments occur in a familiar environment, you’ll see lower cart abandon rates.

Alternatives to integrated payments

Some businesses start with simpler payment structures before taking the next step to integrated solutions. Here’s what that typically looks like: 

• Standard payment gateways: These include services like Stripe or Authorize.net that accept payments without deep platform integration. You can copy-paste their checkout forms or redirect customers to a hosted payment page. This option works well for early-stage products, but since customers have to leave your site to pay, it can create friction. You also have to manually reconcile payment data with your user database. 
• Invoice-based systems: Tools like QuickBooks.com or Bill.com have longer sales cycles and manual approval processes, and don’t scale as well for product-led growth or self-serve checkouts because each transaction requires manual intervention. 
• Manual payment processing: Some businesses get their start with wire transfers, checks, or manual card entry. This is the highest friction option on this list (slow, error-prone, hard to scale). 

There’s a pattern here. All of these options, though easy to start with, create operational overhead that won’t scale with you. Integrated payments eliminate that friction before it bottlenecks growth, which is why most digital product companies make the migration. 

How to set up integrated payments with Paddle

Setting up an integrated payment solution with Paddle is quick and easy. Here’s what your process will look like: 

1. Create your Paddle account and initial configuration. Configure settings like your balance currency, if your prices include tax, and supported payment methods. 
2. Add relevant products. Set up your subscription plans, one-time purchases, and any add-ons. Define your pricing, billing cycles, and trial periods. 
3. Integrate with Paddle’s API. Paddle is API-first. That means you can integrate a checkout flow directly into your app with just a few lines of code. Use Paddle.js for web applications and our mobile SDKs for Android and iOS. Unlike standalone PSPs, where you need separately integrated tax engines and more, Paddle’s API handles everything so you can be up and running by the end of the day. 
4. Test everything in sandbox mode. Use Paddle’s sandbox to make sure your new subscription flows, webhook notifications, and payment scenarios are working as they should. 
5. Configure notifications and webhooks. Set up webhook endpoints so your system receives real-time updates when subscriptions are created, renewed, or canceled. This keeps you in sync with Paddle automatically. 
6. Go live. Review Paddle’s go-live checklist and make that last switch from sandbox to production. Because Paddle covers everything related to tax, compliance, and fraud, you don’t need to worry about additional setup for global sales. You can start accepting payments in 200+ markets immediately. 

This setup means that, unlike standalone PSPs, you won’t have to:  

• Research and implement tax calculation rules for every new jurisdiction
• Build net-new subscription billing logic
• Set up separate fraud prevention tools
• Contract with local payment processors in each market

Paddle manages all of this as part of the core platform, which is how you can go from integration to global revenue in less than one day. 

Grow your revenue, not operational complexity

Integrated payments shouldn’t take months to implement, or require an in-house tax specialist team. Paddle’s merchant of record platform offers payment processing, global compliance, and revenue operations in one API-first solution. 

Want to benefit from integrated payments for your SaaS, AI, gaming, or mobile app? Get started today or speak to an expert, and start taking payments within hours.