SaaS subscription billing with Stripe: what founders must set up

To bill SaaS subscriptions, you need three building blocks: a payment provider that charges customers every month or year and retries failed payments (Stripe Billing is the common choice), a tax rule that depends on who the customer is and where they are, and invoices that meet the rules of your home country. Your application does not handle money itself. It reads the status of each subscription and opens or restricts access accordingly.

This guide walks through all three with Stripe's published fees, the EU VAT rules that catch most founders out, and the part of the work that is still software development. Figures come from official pricing pages and legal texts checked on 3 November 2026. They change, so check them again before you build your pricing model.

What Stripe Billing does, and what stays with you

Stripe Billing is Stripe's subscription product. It covers the money side. The logic of your product is still yours to build.

Stripe's documentation covers four recurring pricing models: flat rate per tier, per seat, tiered and usage-based. Which one you pick is a pricing decision, covered in how to price a B2B SaaS product. Here the question is how to collect the money cleanly.

Stripe's fees, and how they hit your margin

Stripe publishes its rates per country. These are the rates listed for a business based in France on 3 November 2026, along with the Stripe Billing pricing page. If your company is incorporated elsewhere, open the page for your country: the structure is similar, the numbers are not always the same.

A worked example: a €49 monthly plan sold to a business in another EU country, so no VAT is charged, paid with a standard EEA card. Applying the rates to the amount charged gives €0.99 for the card payment and €0.34 for Billing, about €1.33 a month, or roughly 2.7% of revenue. That is arithmetic, not a quote: your Stripe agreement is what counts.

Two levers lower the bill without changing provider:

• Annual billing. The fixed €0.25 is charged once a year instead of twelve times. On a small plan, that matters.
• Direct debit for business customers. A flat fee that does not grow with the amount suits larger subscriptions. It needs a mandate, and a failed debit surfaces later than a declined card.

Payment fees sit next to hosting and support in the running costs of a SaaS platform. Work them into the price list, not after the first payout report.

VAT and sales tax: who pays, and where

This is the part founders discover last. For a business established in the EU, the rules come from the EU VAT Directive 2006/112/EC.

Business to business inside the EU. The place of supply is the customer's country (Article 44 of the directive) and the customer accounts for the VAT (Article 196). Before issuing an invoice without VAT, check your customer's VAT number in the European Commission's VIES service.

Consumers in other EU countries. Electronically supplied services are taxed where the consumer lives (Article 58). The French tax administration explains that a €10,000 annual threshold, excluding VAT, lets a small business established in a single member state keep charging its home VAT until it crosses that line, counted across the whole EU. The same page states that the threshold does not apply to businesses established outside the EU: a US or UK company selling to EU consumers owes VAT in the customer's country from the first sale.

Above the threshold, the One Stop Shop saves you from registering everywhere: one quarterly return, due by the end of the following month, filed in a single member state. Non-EU businesses have their own version of the scheme.

Outside the EU, US sales tax, UK VAT and other regimes each have their own thresholds and registration rules. Whether your product counts as an "electronically supplied service" can also depend on how much human work is bundled in. Have a tax adviser confirm the classification before launch.

Calculate tax yourself, or hand it off

1. Code the rules into your application. Workable if you only sell to businesses in your own country. Once you sell across borders, rates, thresholds and exceptions make this risky.
2. Use Stripe Tax. It calculates tax from the product type and the customer's location, and monitors your sales against registration thresholds. Filing stays with you or a partner.
3. Use a merchant of record. The provider sells on your behalf and becomes liable for the tax. Paddle, for example, lists 5% + 50¢ per transaction and says it files the returns itself. Pricier per transaction, simpler when customers are spread across many countries.

Invoices: the rules of your home country

Your invoices follow the law of the country where your company is established: numbering, legal mentions, tax identifiers. Stripe's invoices can be configured to carry them, but have your accountant review a sample before the first customer.

If you bill French businesses, note that France is moving business invoicing to structured e-invoices sent through approved platforms, with small and medium businesses issuing them from 1 September 2027. Our guide to the French e-invoicing mandate explains what that means for software that invoices.

The terms of service themselves, and the uptime you promise, are covered in the SaaS agreement clauses your customers will ask for.

What your application has to handle

This is where the development work is, and where projects slip when it is underestimated.

• Webhooks. Stripe notifies your application of every event: payment succeeded, payment failed (invoice.payment_failed), plan changed, subscription canceled. Your database must stay in sync, even when a message arrives twice or late.
• Access rights. An active subscription unlocks its plan; an unpaid one restricts it, under a rule you decide and publish in your terms.
• Dunning. According to Stripe's documentation, Smart Retries' recommended default is eight attempts within two weeks. When the schedule ends, you choose: cancel, mark unpaid, pause or leave past due. Warn the customer before you cut access.
• Plan changes. An upgrade mid-month raises the question of proration. Decide the rule before coding it, and show it to the customer.
• Plan limits. Seats, documents, projects: your application counts and enforces them, not Stripe.
• Cancellation. Customers expect to take their data with them. It is a sales argument, and often a contractual obligation.

What we learned running our own products

LPR Studio builds, owns and runs two live products, with two different ways of getting paid.

Izi-Devis, our quoting and invoicing software for tradespeople, has a free plan capped at five quotes with no card required, and a Pro subscription with a published price. The free-plan cap is a rule in the application: the software counts the quotes and offers the upgrade at the right moment.

Tubissime, our personalised song service, is paid per order by card, with no subscription, plus credits for its creative studio. Its back office shows generation costs, revenue and margin for each customer, and prices can be changed without redeploying.

Two lessons that apply to any SaaS:

1. Make prices configurable. A price hard-coded in the software means a release for every pricing test.
2. Track margin per customer from day one. Payment fees, hosting, AI calls: without that measurement, a customer can cost more than they bring in and nobody notices.

Where to start

1. List your target customers: businesses or consumers, home country, EU, rest of the world. The tax rule follows from that.
2. Have a tax adviser confirm how your service is classified.
3. Choose between built-in tax calculation and a merchant of record, comparing fees on your projected revenue.
4. Write down the access rules: trial, unpaid, plan change, cancellation.
5. Test the whole flow in test mode, declined cards included, before you open sign-ups.

If you are preparing a launch, our guide to launching a B2B SaaS as a non-technical founder puts billing back into the full journey, from validating the need to running the product.