Comment by sph
11 hours ago
If selling software for money wasn’t such a pain in the arse I would put stuff on my website rather than itch.io
It took me two weeks, plus sending IDs, incorporating an ltd, to get a license to sell software with Paddle. With itch I just need a paypal/stripe account.
I am going through this right now! I am provisionally approved and still waiting. Even worse I am going through SMS phone number verification with SMTP2GO.
Apparently if you wanna send automated texts in America, you need a real phone number. And to not get immediately blocked, you need to fill out a form that goes to the major carriers for approval (like AT&T). And the form is not unlike Paddle's verification. You need a company, EIN, samples of what your texts will look like. Massive pain.
> And the form is not unlike Paddle's verification. You need a company, EIN, samples of what your texts will look like. Massive pain.
In defense of Paddle (I use them for my own livelihood), they're on the hook for remitting sales taxes to ALL the governments where your customers might reside. They also manage customer disputes, chargebacks, refunds etc. I always redirect support emails to Paddle.net [0] which does the trick 99% of the time.
Stripe or PayPal are nothing like that. They're just payment platforms.
Since Paddle takes on so much liability, it seems reasonable to ask for a lot of initial paperwork from its sellers.
[0] https://paddle.net
Yep, it's called 10DLC. My teams work on telephony integrations, and for the devs to even test that outbound SMS is working, we need to go through this process with every provider we integrate. Massive pain, indeed.
If you accept cryptocurrency you don’t need to do any of this, and not even deal with PayPal (who WILL rob you without a second thought, as has been well documented on the internet for MULTIPLE decades at this point).
I would like to (Bitcoin Lightning only, with a healthy convenience discount) but I'd have to move off Hetzner for my servers because they are really against crypto in a very vague way, and again, that's a lot more work than just using itch.io