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The company
Following the success of his personal YouTube channel, Nick Chapsas founded Dometrain in 2023 to provide high-quality courses by experienced software engineers.
Nick was serving .NET and C# content to over 350,000 subscribers, when connecting with other voices in the industry inspired him to build an educational platform.
Now with around 100 courses covering everything from .NET and Cloud to career progression, Dometrain provides practical learning that mirrors real-world development environments.
We believe in a very specific type of teaching at Dometrain, which is the ‘paired programming’ experience. We want to give the experience that you join a company, you sit next to a senior engineer, and that engineer teaches you how to do things."
Nick Chapsas, Founder, Dometrain
Initially, Dometrain courses were sold as one-time purchases. As the platform began to grow, Nick decided to vary the monetization model, offering both one-time purchases as well as annual and quarterly subscription options. Nick found that having predictable revenue was key to growing his business, as well as being able to pay authors regularly.
With a team of 25 authors, Dometrain is now selling in 144 countries globally. Here’s how Paddle helped the team get there.
The challenge
Lost revenue due to false fraud flags
Initially, Dometrain was using a platform with built-in billing.
But as they began scaling quickly, Nick discovered they were losing a staggering amount of potential sales due to overly aggressive fraud prevention systems.
We found out later we were losing 50% of our sales due to false flags."
Nick Chapsas, Founder, Dometrain
Stripe limitations
Searching for another billing solution with an expanding global customer base, Nick felt restricted by payment models that only offered sales tax compliance in just the US and Europe. After conducting research, he chose to implement Stripe.
While Stripe initially seemed like the perfect developer-friendly solution, it quickly became a huge cause of stress in terms of sales tax compliance. Once the EU VAT threshold was crossed, the logistics of selling globally with a usage-based billing platform really became challenging.
How do I sign up for EU VAT? You have to go through this documentation and find out there's this company that will do that for you - you have to pay a fee to register, then you have to pay an annual fee. That’s a lot of money - but I have to do it. So you go, you pay. But then you see you’ve exceeded Norway, then Switzerland…"
Nick Chapsas, Founder, Dometrain
As Dometrain grew globally, Stripe's ‘starting at’ pricing model didn’t reflect the actual business costs per transaction.
With Stripe, that was the biggest frustration I had. It says ‘starting at this percentage plus these cents per transaction.’ And then as you start ticking yeah, I want revenue recognition, yeah, I want tax compliance - then suddenly I'm paying six, seven percent on every transaction.”
Nick Chapsas, Founder, Dometrain
Under a huge amount of stress, and foreseeing future issues with global tax compliance, Nick found himself handling masses of administrative work rather than focusing on growing the business.
The solution
Seeking a Merchant of Record (MoR) to manage payments and take on the legal responsibility of global sales tax compliance, Nick chose to implement Paddle.
After considering other MoRs like FastSpring and Lemon Squeezy, Nick chose Paddle, favoring the developer experience and the transparent fees.
What was very clear about Paddle, [they said] that's your fee, that's what we do. Be happy, enjoy, right? It was very transparent."
Nick Chapsas, Founder, Dometrain
Nick also appreciated that there are no additional fees as Dometrain expands and requires more billing options, feeling like with Paddle, you’re not penalised for growing.
When you start adding things up, I can guarantee you that, if you have a business that actually tries to do things right with invoices and billing, you are going to pay more than the initial number you see. Who doesn’t want tax calculation at checkout? Who doesn’t want to export purchase invoices? Why is that something I have to pay for?”
Nick Chapsas, Founder, Dometrain
Implementing Paddle into Dometrain was “a piece of cake.” With clear documentation and an API key, the process proved intuitive, taking just two hours to implement. Dometrain started accepting payments immediately.
With a sizable number of customers on Stripe, and a desire to have centralized management on one payment platform, Nick wanted to migrate all payments as soon as possible.
Honestly, the migration was way easier than I thought it would be. I was losing sleep over it, and it was so so nice to have this three, four, five-step process laid out very clearly with timelines."
Nick Chapsas, Founder, Dometrain
Paddle's comprehensive approach meant Dometrain could access staging environments, dry runs, and get personalized migration support from the start.
The results
Instant global sales tax compliance
Nick can now operate Dometrain worldwide without worrying about registration thresholds or manual tax calculations.
I can't express to people who run small to medium-sized businesses how much of a weight VAT compliance can take."
Nick Chapsas, Founder, Dometrain
Using Paddle’s Merchant of Record model means Dometrain’s growing customer base no longer results in the mounting stress of finding compliance solutions and managing them manually.
50% reduction in billing support requests
Before partnering with Paddle, issues like invoice revisions, billing address updates, and payment method changes consumed a significant amount of Nick’s time. Now, Paddle's customer portal has dramatically reduced billing support requests for Dometrain.
One particularly powerful feature is the ability to revise customer details on a completed transaction using the API. As 50% of Dometrain’s support requests were invoice-revision related issues, using this feature dramatically saved resources that can now be used elsewhere.
The biggest time saving in terms of support is billing issues, from invoice revisions to 'I need this invoice' or 'I need to update this.' All of that, which is so hard to manage with something like Stripe, I don't have to worry about anymore."
Nick Chapsas, Founder, Dometrain
Enhanced developer experience
When moving to a Merchant of Record, Nick was concerned about giving up a certain amount of control. But those worries haven't materialized.
The API and developer documentation was great! It’s so intuitive that I didn’t really feel like I’d lost anything."
Nick Chapsas, Founder, Dometrain
Paddle's commitment to constantly improving the developer experience, features, and API fields helps to lead the way in the payments space. Coming from a software engineering background, Nick is now assessing how he can use Paddle and the data he has access to in order to improve the user interface for his customers.
The Paddle MCP server - the ability to write in a natural language and interact with payment data. That is massive for me.”
Nick Chapsas, Founder, Dometrain
Nick speaks about keeping up with the latest Paddle releases to help find new opportunities for the business.
Using Paddle's API to provide data on the performance of each course, Nick can now communicate better with the authors on Dometrain. From doing this, he can then use Paddle’s revenue recognition systems for author payouts.
Using revenue recognition, I can show authors how much of each course was watched and how much money they're going to be paid as the month goes. That would be really hard to build in a database without Paddle."
Nick Chapsas, Founder, Dometrain
Peace of mind for strategic focus
Most importantly, Paddle has allowed Nick to shift focus from compliance concerns to business growth.
The fact that Paddle does this for me, it’s like now I can actually build things and I don’t have to stress about everything else. It’s a real breath of fresh air.”
Nick Chapsas, Founder, Dometrain
Future plans
Dometrain now has a customer portal and a robust billing platform, as well as a bank of expert content and a growing customer base.
Excitingly, Dometrain is also developing an AI tool that leverages transcripts and video context for targeted learning support. This will allow students to ask questions about the things shown in each video. The AI has the context of the entire course and can give students specific answers to what they're asking.
Dometrain’s hope is to launch this tool in the latter half of 2025, approaching with caution so that the tool is as accurate and targeted as possible.
With Paddle managing the strain of billing, Dometrain can continue on its growth trajectory in the world of developer education.
I couldn't be happier. I can't imagine a world where I'm thinking ‘what's next in terms of payment infrastructure?’ Paddle just works, and works well."
Nick Chapsas, Founder, Dometrain
Want to learn how Paddle can help you with global sales tax compliance? Speak to our team or create a free account to get started.