Paddle for digital products

Sell your e-books, software licenses, courses, plugins, and other downloadable files anywhere in the world with Paddle as your merchant of record. Payments, localization, tax, and global compliance handled out-of-the-box.

Companies like Nexus Mods, Fortinet, MotionVFX and MacPaw use Paddle to power their business.

Key features for digital product businesses

One-time products

In Paddle, products and prices are flexible entities you compose into the structure you need. Products describe what you sell, and related prices describe how you sell a product.

A digital product in Paddle is typically a product with a price that has no recurring interval set.

This is how the flow works:

1. Create a product with one or more one-time prices in your Paddle catalog.
2. Build a pricing page or buy button that calls Paddle.js with the price ID.
3. Customer pays through Paddle Checkout. You can choose overlay checkout for a simple integration, or inline checkout for a more branded experience.
4. Paddle sends a transaction.completed webhook. Your webhook handler grants access, sends a license key, or unlocks the download.

The one-time purchase flow isn't a watered-down version of subscriptions. You get the same optimized checkout experience, webhooks, AI tooling, and SDKs that we offer for subscriptions.

Pricing flexibility

One-time products don't have to be flat prices:

• Multiple price points per product
  Offer "Pro license $99" and "Team license $499" on the same product.
• Localized pricing
  Set per-region prices in 30+ currencies, or let Paddle auto-localize from your base price.
• Discount codes and promotional pricing
  Apply percentage or fixed-amount discounts at checkout, scoped to specific products or campaigns.
• Custom amounts at checkout
  Build more complex workflows by creating a transaction in your backend. Pass a one-off price into the transaction for "name your price" or quote-driven sales.
• Bundle pricing
  Paddle supports multi-product checkout, so you can combine multiple products into a single transaction with a single payment.

You can launch promotions, regional sales, or customer-specific deals without redeploying.

Going global without a tax department

Selling digital products across borders quickly turns into a tax problem: VAT in the EU and UK, GST in Australia, India, and Singapore, sales tax across US states, country-specific digital services taxes.

Paddle is a merchant of record, which means:

• Tax is calculated and added at checkout automatically based on the customer's location.
• Paddle remits the tax to the right authority — not you.
• Customers see compliant invoices with the correct VAT/GST treatment, downloadable from their email or the customer portal.
• No registration thresholds to track in each jurisdiction, because Paddle handles this for you.
• You can offer local payment methods in a couple of clicks, since Paddle has local entities across the world.

Nexus Mods saw a 9x revenue uplift in China after switching to Paddle and unlocking local payment methods and tax compliance they couldn't have built themselves.

Optimized checkout experience

Paddle Checkout works out of the box for digital products:

• Overlay checkout opens over your existing site, with minimal disruption to your design.
• Inline checkout embeds the form directly in your page for full visual control.
• Hosted checkout is fully hosted by Paddle, for Mac or iOS apps only.

All three support Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, cards, and local methods like iDEAL, Bancontact, UPI, and Pix — selected automatically based on the customer's region.

After payment, Paddle sends the customer a receipt email with a downloadable invoice. The customer portal gives them a place to access past purchases without having to ask you.

Where to start