A ThriveCart alternative for New Zealand sellers

What is the practical ThriveCart alternative for a New Zealand seller?

For a New Zealand seller, the practical ThriveCart alternative is a checkout that bills in New Zealand dollars including GST, issues tax invoices in your own name, reconciles into Xero, and settles into your own Stripe, PayPal or Airwallex account. You can run it alongside ThriveCart and compare with your own numbers — nothing about leaving interrupts subscriptions that already exist.

That is a checklist, not a pitch. Any product that meets all four points is a reasonable place to land. gocushy is our attempt at exactly that list, so the rest of this post tries to be honest about where ThriveCart is strong — because it is.

What does ThriveCart already get right?

ThriveCart’s tax engine can calculate New Zealand GST at checkout, and that is genuinely useful. The buyer in Auckland is charged the right amount and the buyer in London is not charged New Zealand tax. Plenty of carts cannot do that much, and it would be misleading to suggest otherwise.

It is also a mature cart. Bumps and upsells work, the affiliate centre works, and ThriveCart has Learn, its course platform — gocushy has nothing like it. We are the checkout; whatever hosts your course today keeps hosting it.

What changed in 2026 is the billing model. ThriveCart now bills monthly as standard — from US$47 a month, or US$87 for Pro+ — and it bills in US dollars. For a New Zealand business, that means your own software cost floats with the exchange rate before you have sold anything.

Where is the gap for a New Zealand business?

The gap is everything after the calculation. Working out the GST on a sale is the easy part; what a New Zealand business actually files is built from documents, and that is where a cart designed for somewhere else runs out.

• The invoice. Since April 2023, New Zealand law has defined what the record of a sale must contain — the rules call it taxable supply information. A document headed with another country’s tax vocabulary is one your accountant corrects by hand, sale after sale.
• Your own subscription. The tool’s bill is a business expense in your GST return too. A USD charge arrives as a different NZD figure every month; a fixed NZD line does not.
• Xero. Each sale should land in your ledger with the GST split already correct, so the return is a review rather than a rebuild.

One boundary worth naming: New Zealand charges 15% GST and has required taxable supply information since April 2023, while Australia charges 10% under its own tax invoice rules — a checkout that treats the two as one region setting gets at least one of them wrong.

Is switching away from ThriveCart risky?

Less than it feels. ThriveCart’s own documentation states that moving away does not interrupt existing recurring revenue — active subscriptions keep billing through the payment processor they were created on. That is to ThriveCart’s credit, and it changes the shape of the decision: you are not choosing between staying and blowing up your income. Existing subscriptions stay where they are; the only question is where new sales go.

The same fact applies in reverse, and we would rather say so now. If you start subscriptions on gocushy and later leave, they continue through your own Stripe, PayPal or Airwallex account, because that is where they live. The money never routes through us in either direction.

How do you run the comparison with your own numbers?

Not with a features table — with one real offer.

1. Start the trial and connect your own Stripe, PayPal or Airwallex account.
2. Rebuild your simplest offer, priced in NZD including GST, with its bump or upsell if it has one. The offer shapes gocushy supports are documented, so you can check fit before you build.
3. Send some traffic to each checkout for a fortnight. Compare what the invoice says, what lands in Xero, and what your accountant says at month end.
4. Move offers across one at a time, or not at all. Both outcomes are fine; you will know from your own numbers.

gocushy costs NZ$99 a month including GST, billed in New Zealand dollars, with a 30-day trial and 0% added platform fees — your processor’s published rate is the only per-sale cost. Two limits before you start: we do not host courses, and if you rely on a ThriveCart feature this post has not mentioned, assume we do not have it and check the docs rather than taking a comparison post’s word for it.

The trial exists so you can run that comparison on a real offer, with your own payment account, and read the invoice it produces before you decide anything.

General information about how GoCushy behaves, not tax advice — your accountant knows your circumstances and we do not.