Stripe SDK Alternatives for Multi-Provider Billing

If Stripe is your only payment provider, the official stripe package is the right tool and this article will not talk you out of it. The problem starts when the same product also has to sell through Polar, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, or Dodo Payments — and you discover the Stripe SDK only speaks Stripe. From there you either wire up one SDK per provider and maintain five clients, or you adopt a unified layer that normalizes all five behind one API.

The short version:

• The official Stripe SDK is excellent, but it is single-provider by design — there is no Stripe client that talks to Paddle.
• Running five provider SDKs side by side means five auth models, five pagination styles, five error shapes, five status vocabularies, and five webhook signature schemes.
• A unified SDK such as revenue-sdk collapses that glue into one normalized contract; swapping providers becomes a one-line change.
• The tradeoff is coverage: a unified layer exposes the intersection of what all providers do, plus explicit unsupported errors where they genuinely differ.

Why would you need an alternative to the Stripe SDK?

You need an alternative when a second provider enters the picture — which happens more often than teams expect. Three common triggers:

• You want a merchant of record. Stripe is a payment processor; you remain the seller and owe sales tax, VAT, and GST compliance. Polar, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, and Dodo Payments act as merchant of record and take on that liability. Many teams add one alongside Stripe rather than migrating.
• Stripe is unavailable in your market. Stripe does not support every country for payouts, so developer-tool companies routinely start on an MoR and add Stripe later.
• You are building a platform or template. If your customers bring their own billing account, you do not get to choose the provider — you have to support several.

In all three cases the code that changes is not the business logic; it is the transport layer underneath.

What does the official Stripe SDK do well?

The stripe npm package tracks Stripe’s API closely and is one of the best-maintained SDKs in the payments space. It covers the whole surface — not just subscriptions but Connect, Terminal, Issuing, Tax, Radar, and Billing Meters. It pins API versions explicitly, ships accurate TypeScript types, and has first-class idempotency-key support and automatic retries.

That depth is the point: if you need Stripe Connect payouts or usage-based billing meters, no unified abstraction will match a dedicated SDK, and you should use the dedicated SDK.

What does the per-provider SDK landscape look like?

Each billing provider ships its own client, and the five do not share a shape:

Each is a reasonable choice on its own. The difficulty is not any single library — it is that they were designed independently, so covering five providers means learning and maintaining five unrelated clients. The APIs underneath diverge just as much; how the Stripe, Polar, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, and Dodo Payments APIs differ walks through where.

What does maintaining five billing SDKs actually cost?

The cost is not the five npm install lines. It is the glue between them, and it lands in five places:

• Five authentication models. Stripe secret keys, Polar organization access tokens, Lemon Squeezy API keys, Paddle API keys, and Dodo API keys all differ in shape and in how sandbox is selected — Polar, Paddle, and Dodo use separate hosts, Stripe uses a key prefix, and Lemon Squeezy makes test mode a property of the key.
• Five pagination styles. Stripe cursors, Polar and Lemon Squeezy page numbers, Paddle URL-carrying next links, and Dodo’s zero-based page_number with no has_more field. Each needs bespoke loop code, and the bugs live in the termination conditions.
• Five error shapes. One SDK throws typed errors, another returns a result object, a third rejects with a differently shaped body. Writing one “should I retry this?” branch that works everywhere means normalizing all five by hand.
• Five status vocabularies. This is the expensive one. Lemon Squeezy’s cancelled means “still entitled until ends_at”, while Stripe’s canceled is terminal. Treating them the same revokes access from paying customers.
• Five webhook schemes. Three signature algorithms and two encodings across five providers, each with its own header names and its own replay-window semantics.

That glue is code you write, test, and own forever — and it is where multi-provider billing quietly rots.

Where does a unified SDK like revenue-sdk fit?

A unified SDK collapses that glue into one normalized contract. revenue-sdk is an open-source, zero-dependency TypeScript SDK that gives you a single API over Stripe, Polar, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, and Dodo Payments. You write your products, checkout, subscription, portal, and webhook logic once, and switching providers means swapping one argument:

import { createClient } from 'revenue-sdk';
import { stripe } from 'revenue-sdk/stripe';

const client = createClient({
  provider: stripe({ secretKey: process.env.STRIPE_SECRET_KEY! }),
});

const checkout = await client.checkouts.create({
  items: [{ product: 'price_123' }],
  customerEmail: '[email protected]',
  successUrl: 'https://example.com/thanks',
});
console.log(checkout.url);

Point the same code at Polar by changing only the provider factory:

import { polar } from 'revenue-sdk/polar';

const client = createClient({
  provider: polar({ accessToken: process.env.POLAR_ACCESS_TOKEN! }),
});

The five cost centers above become one each:

• Authentication is one options object per factory.
• Pagination is listAll async generators that follow the provider’s cursor for you — see Pagination.
• Errors are a single RevenueError with a closed code union — unauthorized, not_found, rate_limited, payment_required, unsupported, and so on — plus retryable and retryAfter hints:

import { RevenueError } from 'revenue-sdk';

try {
  await client.subscriptions.get({ id: subscriptionId });
} catch (error) {
  if (error instanceof RevenueError && error.code === 'rate_limited') {
    // back off using error.retryAfter
  }
}

• Subscription status is one seven-value union with cancelAtPeriodEnd broken out as its own boolean, documented in Status mapping.
• Webhooks are standalone verifyWebhook / parseWebhookEvent exports per provider that take a Web-standard Request and need no client instance — see Webhooks.

RevenueError also redacts known secrets from its message before construction, so an API key never lands in your logs. Because the SDK is built on fetch and Web Crypto with zero runtime dependencies, it runs on Node.js 22+, Cloudflare Workers without nodejs_compat, Deno, and Bun — see the Cloudflare Workers guide.

Where does a unified SDK get in your way?

It is worth being blunt about the limits, because an abstraction that hides them is worse than no abstraction:

• The surface is the useful intersection, not the union. revenue-sdk covers products, checkouts, customers, subscriptions, the customer portal, and webhooks. Stripe Connect, Terminal, Issuing, and Tax are out of scope by design.
• Provider gaps are real and surfaced, not smoothed over. Paddle has no API-hosted checkout, so capabilities.hostedCheckout is false and you render the Paddle.js overlay yourself. Dodo Payments has no end-trial operation. Lemon Squeezy cannot filter subscriptions by customer ID. The client throws unsupported instead of silently doing something else — read them at runtime from client.capabilities, or up front in the capability matrix.
• Every model keeps raw. When you do need a provider-specific field, it is one property away rather than a fork.
• It is 0.x. The API may change between minor releases.

Stripe SDK vs per-provider SDKs vs a unified SDK

The honest rule of thumb: one provider, ever → use its official SDK. Two or more providers, core billing operations → use a unified SDK. Deep provider-specific features → use both, with the unified client for the shared 90% and the native SDK where you need the rest.

Frequently asked questions

Is there an official Stripe SDK that supports other payment providers?

No. The stripe npm package is maintained by Stripe and targets the Stripe API exclusively. Supporting another provider requires either that provider’s own SDK or a third-party unified layer such as revenue-sdk.

Can I use revenue-sdk alongside the official Stripe SDK?

Yes. They are independent packages and can share the same secret key. A common pattern is to use the unified client for products, checkouts, subscriptions, and webhooks, and drop to the native Stripe SDK for Stripe-only features like Connect or Tax.

Does a unified billing SDK work on Cloudflare Workers?

revenue-sdk does. It has zero runtime dependencies and uses only Web-standard APIs — fetch, crypto.subtle, TextEncoder, URL — so it runs on Cloudflare Workers without the nodejs_compat flag, as well as on Deno, Bun, and Node.js 22+. Node-oriented SDKs that import node:crypto typically need the compatibility flag.

How do I handle features one provider supports and another does not?

Read them as data before you offer them. Every client exposes client.capabilities, a plain object of booleans and arrays, so you can branch in your UI. When you call an unsupported operation anyway, the client throws a RevenueError with code unsupported rather than silently doing something different.

What happens to provider-specific fields under a normalized model?

Every normalized model — Product, Price, Checkout, Customer, Subscription, Order — carries a raw property holding the untouched provider payload, so nothing the API returns is out of reach.

Keep reading

• Stripe vs Polar vs Lemon Squeezy vs Paddle vs Dodo: How Their Billing APIs Differ — the field guide to all five APIs.
• How to Normalize Subscription Status Across Billing Providers — one entitlement check for five providers.
• How to Verify Webhook Signatures from Stripe, Polar, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, and Dodo Payments — all five schemes with working code.
• Client and providers — how the thin adapters and fat client fit together.