What payment solution do SMB SaaS companies need?

Choosing the right payment solution depends on how your SaaS business earns revenue and whether you’re billing your own customers or enabling merchants to accept payments through your platform.

If you need to bill your own SaaS customers: Stripe Billing¹

Stripe Billing is the default for a reason. It covers the full subscription lifecycle: recurring billing, usage-based models, metered billing, proration, trials, discounts, and dunning automation. Stripe describes its Smart Retries feature as using machine learning to retry failed payments at the optimal time, and its cancellation survey tools help platforms understand and reduce voluntary churn. It supports 135-plus currencies and dozens of local payment methods including ACH, BACS, and SEPA Direct Debit, which matters if you are selling internationally.

The tradeoffs are cost and flexibility at scale. Stripe Billing charges 0.5% of billing volume on its pay-as-you-go plan, or a monthly subscription starting at $0.80 per active subscription per month on its flat-rate plan. For platforms with complex pricing logic or high billing volume, those fees compound. Stripe is also primarily self-serve: it is exceptional infrastructure, but it does not come with a commercial partner who helps you think through pricing strategy, merchant acquisition, or how to optimise your payments stack over time.

For early-stage or bootstrapped SaaS billing its own customers, Stripe Billing is the right starting point.

If your platform enables merchants to take payments: Fiska

Fiska is an embedded payments partner built exclusively for SaaS platforms. Rather than helping you bill your own customers, Fiska enables your merchants to accept payments through your platform, and turns that payment volume into a recurring revenue stream for you.

Fiska operates on a revenue-share model. Your cost basis is the actual interchange rate set by card networks, plus a small per-transaction fee. You set your own pricing above that for each merchant, keep the margin, and Fiska only earns when you do. The more your merchants process, the more revenue your platform earns passively, alongside your core subscription income.

Fiska handles everything on the compliance and operational side: KYC, KYB, underwriting, PCI DSS Level 1 infrastructure, chargeback management, and white-labelled merchant support. There are no platform fees, no setup fees, and no minimum volume commitments. Integration covers in-person, online, and mobile payments across the US and Canada through a unified API, with a go-live timeline of weeks rather than months.

The practical result is that your merchants stay entirely inside your product, payments are branded under your name, and a share of every transaction your merchants process flows back to you as revenue without adding operational overhead.

Book a call to learn more about how Fiska can help your SaaS platform monetize payments.

FAQ

1. Should SMB SaaS companies build payments in-house or use a partner?

For most SMB SaaS companies, building payments infrastructure in-house is neither practical nor cost-effective. Becoming a PayFac or directly integrating with acquiring banks requires card network registration, compliance oversight, underwriting capability, fraud monitoring, and ongoing operational management.

Using established providers such as Stripe Billing for subscription management or an embedded payments partner like Fiska for merchant enablement allows SMB platforms to access mature infrastructure without hiring a dedicated payments team. This reduces risk, speeds up time to market, and keeps engineering resources focused on core product development

2. Can an SMB SaaS company use both Stripe Billing and embedded payments?

Yes. Many SaaS platforms use Stripe Billing to charge their own subscription customers while simultaneously embedding payments for their merchants through a separate partner.

These serve different revenue streams:

• Stripe Billing manages your SaaS subscription revenue.
• Embedded payments from Fiska enable you to monetize your merchants’ transaction volume.

Using both can create a dual-revenue model — subscription income plus payments revenue — without requiring the platform to become a PayFac.

Sources

¹ https://stripe.com/billing

All information is based on publicly available materials from the respective provider websites at the time of writing and may be subject to change.