Diversify Payments Risk as SaaS Scales
Michelle Valentine, co-founder and CEO of Anrok, on the modularization of the SaaS finance stack
Multiple payment processors are less about optimization, and more about resilience. Once a SaaS company has enough volume, a single gateway becomes a real operating risk because one outage, fraud spike, reserve hold, or policy change can slow collections and block renewals. Finance teams also add ACH alongside cards because large invoices get expensive on card rails, so the stack naturally fragments as deal size and payment complexity rise.
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In practice, bigger SaaS companies route different payment flows through different systems. ACH is common for large enterprise invoices, while card processors like Stripe or Braintree handle self serve and recurring card payments. That mix lowers fee drag and prevents too much revenue from depending on one provider.
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This is one reason modular tools matter to Anrok. If tax calculation only works on one processor’s transactions, it breaks as soon as a company adds a second gateway, a billing layer like Chargebee, or direct invoicing through its ERP. The tax system has to sit above the payments layer, not inside one rail.
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The contrast with Paddle is structural. Paddle acts as merchant of record and reseller, so it stands in the middle of the transaction and handles tax, disputes, and order support itself. That is attractive for smaller software sellers, but larger SaaS companies often want to keep the buyer relationship and processor mix under their own control.
As SaaS companies move upmarket, the payments layer is likely to look more like a portfolio than a single vendor choice. That pushes more value toward systems that can reconcile activity across billing, invoicing, tax, and multiple gateways, and away from all in one tools that assume one processor will stay at the center forever.