Vs Cashier (Stripe, Paddle) & Lemon Squeezy

Picking the billing layer for a new Laravel app? If you've reached for Laravel Cashier before, Vatly will feel immediately familiar — a Billable trait, subscribed(), subscription()->swap(), a wired-up webhook endpoint. The difference is what sits behind the API: Vatly is a Merchant of Record, so it is the legal seller and handles VAT, invoicing, and payment compliance for you — and it's Europe-first, operating under EU jurisdiction.

This page is an honest, side-by-side look at how vatly-laravel stacks up against the Cashier-style packages you might otherwise reach for — Laravel Cashier (Stripe), Laravel Cashier (Paddle), and Lemon Squeezy for Laravel — gaps included.

At a glance

Two takeaways:

1. With laravel/cashier, you're the seller of record. It runs on classic Stripe Billing, so you register for VAT, file, and remit in every market you sell into — the compliance and the liability sit with your company. (Stripe's own Merchant-of-Record product, Managed Payments, is a separate, US-based service you'd integrate instead — not the Cashier subscriptions you're building on.)
2. So the real difference between MoRs is jurisdiction. Paddle is UK, Lemon Squeezy and Stripe are US, Vatly is EEA — your seller-of-record entity and customer data stay under EU law. That, not the API, is the reason to choose one over another.

The developer experience

For a greenfield app, Vatly is your only biller — so you use the plain Billable trait, and the code reads like Cashier:

use Vatly\Laravel\Billable;

class User extends Authenticatable
{
    use Billable;
}

// Start a subscription — redirect to Vatly's hosted checkout
$checkout = $user->subscribe()
    ->toPlan('subscription_plan_7Hd9Kf2Lm')
    ->withTrialDays(14)
    ->create();

return redirect($checkout->links->checkoutUrl->href);

// Gate features on subscription state
if ($user->subscribed()) {
    // …
}

$user->subscription()->swap('subscription_plan_other');
$user->subscription()->cancel();      // Vatly decides immediate vs. grace
$user->subscription()->resume();      // while on the grace period

// One-off purchase
$user->checkout()->create(
    items: [['id' => 'one_off_product_3Qb8Wz1Yt', 'quantity' => 1]],
    redirectUrlSuccess: route('billing.success'),
    redirectUrlCanceled: route('billing'),
);

// Receipts — hosted invoice URLs, no PDF plumbing
foreach ($user->orders as $order) {
    echo $order->invoiceUrl();
}

No VAT logic, no tax tables, no invoice templates, no client-side checkout widget to embed — the checkout is a server-side redirect, like Stripe Checkout. See Subscriptions and Checkouts for the full surface.

Feature parity, and what's still on the roadmap

Vatly covers what a SaaS needs to start selling: subscriptions with trials, plan swaps, cancellation with grace and resume, one-off purchases, hosted checkout, refunds and chargebacks, and — because it's a Merchant of Record — VAT, invoicing and tax compliance handled for you. A few capabilities you may use elsewhere aren't in the box yet. Here's the honest picture, and how to bridge it.

The shape of the trade is deliberate: Vatly does the compliance-heavy core that's genuinely hard to build — being the seller of record, VAT across the EU, invoicing, disputes — and is filling in the conveniences (coupons next) in the open. For a subscription SaaS selling into Europe and the world, there's enough here to launch today.

Why teams choose Vatly

A Merchant of Record makes the tax burden disappear — it becomes the legal seller, so VAT, invoicing and remittance stop being your problem. The real question is whose entity you hand that to, and that's where Vatly stands apart:

• Europe-first, by design. EEA-based, EU jurisdiction, customer data kept in Europe. The other MoRs sit in the UK (Paddle) or the US (Lemon Squeezy, Stripe Managed Payments) — jurisdiction is the one axis that genuinely separates them, and the reason Vatly exists.
• No exposure to US policy. Your seller-of-record relationship and your customers' data stay under EU law — a clean answer when an enterprise buyer, or your own board, asks where they sit.
• One familiar API. The Cashier-shaped surface means there's little to learn and little to rewrite.

You Just Ship.

Next steps

• Starting fresh → Getting started wires up the trait, config, migrations and webhook in a few minutes.
• Already running another provider → Migrating from Cashier shows how to add Vatly beside your current biller and migrate customers over gradually.
• Reference → Configuration · Customers · Checkouts · Subscriptions · Orders · Webhooks

Compared against, at time of writing: Laravel Cashier (Stripe) · Laravel Cashier (Paddle) · Lemon Squeezy for Laravel. Their method names and table layouts follow those packages' current releases — verify against the version you have pinned before relying on a specific signature.