Craftgate vs Lemon Squeezy

Craftgate is an Istanbul-based payment orchestration platform for Turkish merchants. Instead of integrating each bank's virtual POS separately, a merchant connects its existing POS agreements and payment providers to Craftgate once and manages them through a single API and dashboard, routing every transaction to the most suitable provider and reducing dependency on any single acquirer.

The platform covers smart routing rules based on card type, bank, installment count or cost, automatic fallback to another POS when a provider fails, installment tables and campaigns, a hosted checkout form and payment links, card storage for repeat payments, fraud rules, and marketplace features for sub-merchant onboarding and split payouts. Reporting brings transactions from every bank into one view, which simplifies reconciliation, and SDKs and plugins help with integration into custom sites and common e-commerce platforms. Pricing is not public and is agreed with each merchant, typically based on transaction volume.

Craftgate suits mid-size and large merchants, marketplaces and subscription businesses that already have several bank POS agreements and want better approval rates, lower costs and resilience. Very small merchants without their own bank agreements are usually better served by an all-in-one payment service provider such as iyzico, PayTR, Param or Sipay, which handle the merchant relationship themselves. Global orchestration tools such as Spreedly or Primer have little coverage of Turkish banks and local installment practices.

Lemon Squeezy is a merchant of record for software companies, indie developers and creators selling SaaS subscriptions, apps and digital products. As merchant of record it is the legal seller of each transaction, so it calculates, collects and remits sales tax and VAT worldwide, handles fraud and chargebacks, and pays you out, removing most of the compliance work of selling globally. Stripe acquired Lemon Squeezy in 2024.

The product includes hosted checkouts and an overlay checkout with localized pricing, subscriptions with trials and proration, usage-based billing, license key generation with an activation and validation API, a customer portal, discount codes, an affiliate program and built-in email marketing. Official SDKs and starter kits for Next.js and Laravel, plus webhooks and Zapier, make it quick to integrate. Pricing is a percentage plus a fixed fee per transaction with no monthly charge, and extra fees apply to international cards, PayPal and subscription payments.

Lemon Squeezy fits indie hackers and small SaaS teams that want to start charging globally in an afternoon, including sellers in countries where Stripe is not directly available. Fees are higher than using Stripe directly, its roadmap now depends on Stripe's plans, and invoicing depth is lighter than Paddle. Polar is an open-source alternative with lower fees, Paddle serves larger SaaS companies, and Gumroad suits creators selling simple digital downloads.