Modular SaaS finance preserves customer ownership
Michelle Valentine, co-founder and CEO of Anrok, on the modularization of the SaaS finance stack
This is really a control versus convenience trade. Paddle removes a lot of tax and billing work by acting as the legal seller, but that also means the transaction runs through Paddle’s checkout, invoices, and support flows, which is a poor fit for SaaS companies that want their own brand, pricing logic, billing stack, and direct ownership of renewals, upgrades, and customer payment history.
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As merchant of record, Paddle is the principal in the sale, not just a software vendor in the background. Paddle says buyers purchase through Paddle, order related support goes to Paddle, and Paddle issues the payout paperwork back to the software company. That is the structural reason the customer relationship shifts.
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That trade works best for smaller software sellers that want to outsource everything, payments, tax registration, filing, remittance, and compliant invoicing. It becomes less attractive as a company gets bigger and runs a more custom stack across billing systems, ERPs, multiple processors, and direct enterprise sales motions.
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Anrok sits on the other side of that line. It plugs into existing systems like Stripe, Chargebee, QuickBooks, and ERPs so the software company keeps its own checkout and billing relationship, while outsourcing the tax engine and filing work in the background. That matches how SaaS finance stacks tend to unbundle as complexity rises.
The likely direction is more separation between the system that owns the buyer and the software that handles compliance. Merchant of record products will keep winning with smaller and simpler sellers, while larger SaaS companies will keep moving toward modular stacks where payments, billing, and tax are connected, but no single vendor stands between them and the customer.