Most affiliate managers treat their payout system like a necessary evil: pick Stripe, Paddle, or hire a developer, and move on. That works until your affiliate network grows. At $2K monthly affiliate payouts, the difference between platforms is noise. At $200K, it's your biggest operational line item—and choosing wrong means either hemorrhaging to fees or building a fraud liability you're not equipped to manage. This is a calculation problem with no universal answer. The right platform depends on your volume, your currency needs, your ability to swallow fraud losses, and how much operational risk you can tolerate. The three contenders: feature matrix and core risk Before we touch pricing, you need to understand what you're actually choosing between. Stripe Billing (with connected accounts for affiliate payouts) charges transaction fees upfront, connects to Stripe Connect for payouts, and offloads payment collection but requires you to manage affiliate verification, fraud detection, and reconciliation yourself. You own the KYC process. Paddle is a revenue operations platform that acts as the merchant of record. You don't collect payments directly; Paddle does. It handles VAT, local tax compliance, currency conversion, and fraud detection as part of its standard service. Your affiliate payouts run through Paddle's vendor management system. Custom code means you've hired a developer to build payout logic, usually integrated with Stripe or another payment processor. You own the fraud logic, the KYC rules, the currency handling, and the reconciliation. Custom code scales to your exact business rules—and breaks in ways that are entirely your responsibility. The question isn't which is "best." It's which failure mode you can survive. $2K monthly: when fees are a rounding error At $2K in affiliate payouts per month, all three approaches look interchangeable. Stripe Billing: 2.9% transaction fee + 1% Stripe Connect payout fee = 3.9% total = $78/month. You manually verify affiliates, manage bank account details, and watch for duplicate payouts. Paddle: ~5% take-rate (varies by currency and geography) = $100/month. Paddle validates affiliates, detects fraud patterns, handles currency conversion into your affiliate's local currency, and guarantees payouts are compliant. Custom code: $2,000–$5,000 developer setup, then ~0.5% for Stripe Connect (no collection fees because you're skipping payment processing). $10/month ongoing. But you've now written a fraud detector, a KYC flow, currency conversion logic, and a payout scheduler. One bug in the payout loop costs more than six months of Paddle's premium. At $2K, the honest recommendation is Paddle or Stripe Billing. The money saved with custom code doesn't justify the operational risk. You're not yet at a volume where the math flips. $20K monthly: where the fee structure starts to bite At $20K monthly, the percentage difference becomes real money. Stripe Billing: 3.9% take-rate = $780/month. Add 30 minutes per week of manual affiliate verification, bank detail management, and reconciliation. (Many teams underestimate this; it scales with affiliate count, not volume.) Your fraud liability: unlimited. If you pay a fraudulent affiliate, the loss is yours to recover. Paddle: ~5% take-rate = $1,000/month. Paddle's KYC rules, fraud rules, and currency handling are automatic. You don't reconcile; Paddle does. If a payout fails, Paddle retries. If fraud is detected, Paddle eats the chargeback cost up to a threshold, then reports it back to you for investigation. Custom code: ~0.5% (Stripe Connect only) = $100/month. But you now need to own fraud detection. A basic rule set (rate limits per affiliate, geolocation checks, suspicious velocity flags) takes 40 developer hours to build correctly and another 20 hours per quarter to maintain as attack patterns evolve. At a typical rate, that's $4,000–$6,000 per quarter in engineering time. Custom code is now $1,500–$2,000 per month in hidden cost, plus your fraud liability. Custom code's fee advantage evaporates the moment you factor in fraud detection, currency conversion, and regulatory compliance. Most teams don't count engineering time as a cost. At $20K, Stripe Billing is reasonable if you have 10–20 affiliates and can afford the verification overhead. Paddle makes sense if your affiliates span multiple countries or if you want fraud detection that isn't your problem. Custom code is only defensible if you have a dedicated payments engineer and you're already building other payout logic (payroll, vendor management) that shares the same infrastructure. $200K monthly: the economics invert hard At $200K in monthly affiliate payouts, the fee structure dominates the conversation, and fraud risk becomes existential. Stripe Billing: 3.9% take-rate = $7,800/month. Manual reconciliation now requires a part-time operations hire. You've got 200+ affiliates, and the verification burden is real. Fraud detection is still your problem. If a cohort o