- Payments. I don't want to spend time on registering in different states, sending tax return, and want to us a company which covers it for me. Stripe obviously won't work, since it's not a merchant of record. I have heard good things about paddle, but are there any other alternatives?
- Accounting. I want it to be as simple as possible. As far as I see, the easiest one is the pass through LLC.
- LLC. Does it make sense to incorporate in Delaware, or use my home state (I am in NYS).
If you have a single person SaaS, would be nice to learn how you handle all of the above.
The main alternatives I know of are Gumroad and Fastspring. My feeling last time I looked at the APIs and features was Gumroad was more for digital products you buy a license key for (vs a SaaS subscription), and Fastspring was feature packed (e.g. users get a web interface to manage their subscription) but more expensive.
I'm using Paddle for a subscription-based Chrome extension (https://www.checkbot.io/) and it's made accounting about as simple as it could be. Paddle send a payment once a month, it gets reported as income in tax returns and that's about it for accounting. I've never had to think about country specific VAT or sales tax, or keep up to date with any changing requirements there (similar to app store payments). They charge 5% + $0.50 on each transaction which I'm happy with.
Search for economic nexus to learn about the states and as always please consult an accountant.