Gumroad, Paddle and Lemon Squeezy will sell your product for you, in their own name, for a cut of every sale. Stripe, PayPal and Airwallex will process your sale in your name for a processing fee. The gap between those two arrangements is not really the percentage. It is who the seller is.
A merchant-of-record platform sells your product as the legal seller — its name is on the buyer's statement and the invoice, and it takes roughly 5 to 13 percent for that. Selling on your own account keeps you the seller: the money settles into your own Stripe, PayPal or Airwallex account, the invoice is yours, and a New Zealand business still files its own GST return either way — the platform fee does not buy the return away.
The nearest offline analogy is a distributor. When a bookshop sells your book, the receipt carries the bookshop’s name, the refund queue is the bookshop’s, and you get a remittance later. A merchant of record works the same way for digital products: the buyer’s contract is with the platform, the chargeback lands on the platform, and you are paid on the platform’s schedule. None of that is sinister. It is simply a different answer to the question of who sold the thing.
Gumroad charges 10 percent plus US$0.50 on each sale, which works out to roughly 13 percent all-in once card processing is included. Paddle and Lemon Squeezy charge 5 percent plus US$0.50, and both are built for software companies selling into dozens of countries at once. Those are the published rates as of August 2026, and they are not padding — they pay for something specific.
That something is overseas tax. When a buyer in Berlin purchases through a merchant of record, the platform registers for, collects and remits German VAT in its own name. Multiply that across the EU, the UK and the American states that tax digital goods, and you can see what the fee is for. If you sell software worldwide and never want to think about foreign VAT, that service is real work done by someone else.
What the fee does not buy is your own tax position. A New Zealand resident business past the GST registration threshold still registers and still files its returns, whether its sales came through a merchant of record or through its own accounts. The fee moves the overseas problem; the New Zealand return stays exactly where it was. And because the invoice carries the platform’s name, the buyer relationship — the email address, the renewal, the refund conversation — belongs to the platform too.
The clearest way to see the difference is to follow one payment down each path.
On the top path the money arrives later, on the platform’s payout schedule, minus its fee. On the bottom path it settles into your own account at your processor’s normal speed, and gocushy’s job is finished the moment the charge succeeds. We instruct the payment; we never hold it.
On NZ$100,000 a year of sales, a 13 percent all-in rate is about NZ$13,000. gocushy is NZ$99 a month including GST — about NZ$1,188 a year at today’s price — and on both paths you also pay your processor’s ordinary card fees, so those roughly cancel out of the comparison. What you are weighing is the remaining eleven or twelve thousand dollars against the value of never thinking about foreign VAT.
Subscriptions sharpen the same point. A subscription created on your own account lives in your own processor, so the life of a subscription does not depend on the checkout tool that created it. A subscription created by a merchant of record is the platform’s contract with the buyer, and it stays that way.
If most of your revenue is software sold overseas, and the thought of a dozen foreign VAT registrations makes you want to close the laptop, a merchant of record is a defensible choice — you are paying 5 to 13 percent of revenue for a genuinely hard job done in someone else’s name. Take that deal with clear eyes: for as long as you stay, the invoices, the statements and the customer records are theirs, and your New Zealand GST return is still yours to file.
If most of your buyers are in New Zealand, the trade runs the other way. Your invoices should carry your GST number, your sales should land in your own account, and your accountant should see all of it in Xero without translating someone else’s paperwork. That is the case gocushy is built for: a checkout with bumps, upsells and affiliates that sells in your name, not ours.
The trial is the quickest way to check the claim — make a test sale and look at whose name is on the invoice and whose account the money is sitting in.
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