If you charge by usage and want a Merchant of Record to handle taxes and compliance, your options are narrow: most MoRs are built for fixed subscriptions, and most usage-based billing engines are not MoRs. Commet is built for exactly this combination — a Merchant of Record with native usage-based billing, credits, balance, and seats.
Why MoR + Usage-Based Billing Is a Rare Combination
The billing market splits into two camps that rarely overlap.
On one side are merchants of record. Paddle, Lemon Squeezy (acquired by Stripe in 2024), and FastSpring act as the legal seller of your product: they collect the payment, handle sales tax and VAT, issue receipts, and deal with chargebacks. Their platforms grew up around fixed-price subscriptions, licenses, and one-time purchases, and that is where they are strongest. Metered consumption, credit burndown, or prepaid balances are not the center of their model.
On the other side are usage-based billing engines. Orb, Lago, and Metronome are excellent at ingesting events, aggregating usage, and turning it into invoice line items. But none of them is a Merchant of Record. You remain the legal seller, which means you still need a payment processor (usually Stripe), a tax solution, and your own compliance, invoicing, and refund handling.
So teams that charge by usage typically end up assembling three or four vendors — metering engine, payment processor, tax service, dunning tooling — and gluing them together. The point of a Merchant of Record is to avoid exactly that.
Is Chargebee a Merchant of Record?
No. Chargebee is a subscription billing and revenue management platform that sits on top of your payment gateway (Stripe, Braintree, and others). It manages plans, invoices, and the subscription lifecycle, but the money flows through your own merchant account. Your company remains the legal seller, responsible for tax registration, remittance, and compliance — Chargebee can calculate taxes, but it does not remit them as the seller. See our full Chargebee comparison.
Does Recurly Act as a Merchant of Record?
No. Recurly is a subscription management platform that connects to your own payment gateways. Like Chargebee, it orchestrates recurring billing on top of your merchant account, so you remain the merchant of record for every transaction: tax registrations, filings, and disputes stay with you. See our full Recurly comparison.
Is Stripe a Merchant of Record?
No — when you sell through Stripe, your company is the merchant of record. Stripe is a payment processor: it moves the money and offers Stripe Tax to calculate taxes, but registering and remitting in each jurisdiction remains your responsibility in the standard setup. Stripe does own an MoR product — it acquired Lemon Squeezy in 2024 — but that is a separate offering aimed primarily at digital products and straightforward subscriptions, not metered billing.
What About Orb, Lago, and Metronome?
These are usage-based billing specialists, and they go deep: event pipelines, complex aggregations, enterprise-grade metering. If your billing logic needs custom SQL transforms over multiple event streams, they are strong tools. But they solve metering, not selling. With any of them you still bring your own payment processor, your own tax solution, and your own compliance. See how Commet compares to Orb for a detailed breakdown.
Where Commet Fits
Commet is a Merchant of Record built specifically for SaaS and AI products that charge by consumption. Both halves of the problem are native:
As Merchant of Record, Commet is the legal seller. Taxes are calculated, collected, and remitted for you, compliance and refunds are handled, and you receive clean payouts. Customers can be charged in their local currency in 20+ markets, and payouts arrive in local currency in 112 countries.
As a billing engine, usage is a first-class primitive, not an add-on. Plans support three consumption models — metered usage, credits, and prepaid balance — plus seat-based pricing. You send usage events through the SDK, and Commet meters, invoices, and charges automatically.
A few honest boundaries: Commet processes card payments only (no PayPal, wire, or local payment methods today), and it does not issue locally certified e-invoices in countries that mandate them. Pricing is a flat 4.5% + $0.40 per successful transaction — see pricing for details.
How the Options Compare
| Merchant of Record | Usage-based billing | |
|---|---|---|
| Paddle, FastSpring, Lemon Squeezy | Yes | Built primarily for subscriptions and one-time sales |
| Orb, Lago, Metronome | No — you are the seller | Yes, specialist depth |
| Chargebee, Recurly | No — runs on your gateway | Subscription-first, with usage features |
| Stripe | No — you are the seller | Stripe Billing supports metered pricing; tax remittance stays with you |
| Commet | Yes | Native: metered, credits, balance, seats |
If usage-based pricing is core to your product and you do not want to become a tax department, the shortlist for a Merchant of Record with native metered billing is short. That is the gap Commet exists to fill. See how it compares to Paddle if you are weighing the MoR incumbents.