The product is built. The pricing page is designed. Then you open Stripe, pick your country from the list, and it is not there. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Egypt, Vietnam, most of Africa and large parts of South Asia and Latin America are outside Stripe's supported list, and the AI that built your checkout has no idea. This is the wall we hit ourselves, so here is the full map.
Option 1: A merchant of record
A merchant of record (Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, and a few others) sells your product on your behalf. The customer's receipt names them, they handle sales tax and VAT in every country, and they pay you out on a schedule. You do not need a company in a supported country, only a bank account they can pay. The cost is a percentage of each sale plus a fixed fee, higher than Stripe's, and you give up some control over the checkout and refund flow. For a SaaS under a few thousand dollars a month this is usually the fastest working answer, and it is what we run on our own product.
Option 2: A company in a supported country
A US LLC (Stripe Atlas, or a registered agent in Wyoming or Delaware) or a UK Ltd gives you a Stripe account in that entity's name. You then need a bank account for the entity, an EIN or the UK equivalent, an annual filing, and a way to move money home. It is the most flexible option and the right one once revenue justifies the overhead, but it is weeks of paperwork before the first charge, and Stripe can still ask for proof that the business genuinely operates from that country.
Option 3: A local or regional gateway
Most countries have a gateway that accepts local cards and wallets and settles to a local bank. These work well when your customers are also local. They rarely handle international cards, subscriptions and currency conversion as cleanly as a global provider, and the integration is usually a redirect flow rather than a drop-in checkout. If your buyers are abroad, this is a second rail, not the main one.
Option 4: Invoice and get paid directly
For a handful of larger customers, an invoice paid by bank transfer, Wise or Payoneer works from anywhere. It does not scale to self-serve signups and it puts the subscription logic on you, but it gets the first revenue in while one of the other options is being set up.
What people try that does not work
- A friend's Stripe account in a supported country. Stripe's checks catch the mismatch between the account owner and the business, and a frozen balance is worse than no payments.
- A supported-country address with a local phone number. Same outcome, later.
- Waiting for Stripe to add your country. The supported list moves slowly, and your launch date does not.
How to choose
If you need to charge this month and your customers are international, use a merchant of record. If you already have real revenue and want lower fees and full control, set up the foreign entity and migrate. If your customers are in your own country, add the local gateway. Keep invoicing for the enterprise deals in every case. The swap from one rail to another later is a known job, so the decision now is not permanent.
Take-Money-Now is our fixed-price package for exactly this wall: we pick the rail that fits your customers and country, wire the checkout, subscriptions and webhooks into your existing app, and hand you a working payment flow. The price is on the pricing page.
