Paddle – Payment Gateway Plugin for Acelle

Accept global card payments and recurring subscriptions through Paddle — without writing a single line of webhook code. Drop-in plugin for Acelle Mail SaaS billing. Paddle handles tax, hosted checkout, dunning, and renewals. You just collect the payout.

Why Paddle?

Paddle (paddle.com) is a Merchant of Record — meaning Paddle is the legal seller, not you. That single difference removes the hardest parts of running a global SaaS:

• Sales tax / VAT / GST: Paddle calculates, collects, and remits in 200+ jurisdictions for you.
• PCI / SCA / 3DS: Paddle’s hosted checkout is fully compliant; you never touch card data.
• Dunning + retries: Paddle’s smart-retry logic recovers failed renewals automatically.
• Refunds, chargebacks, fraud: Paddle handles disputes; you don’t field bank calls.
• Local payment methods: Cards, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, iDEAL, Alipay — Paddle adds them, you get them for free.

You set prices in your Paddle dashboard. Customers click “Subscribe” in your Acelle UI. The plugin handles the rest.

What this plugin does

Adds Paddle as a payment-gateway type inside Acelle’s admin. Once installed, your Plans → Payment Gateways screen lets you create one or more Paddle gateways (e.g. one Sandbox for testing, one Production for live customers). Customers checking out can pick Paddle alongside Stripe, Offline, or any other gateway you’ve enabled.

Behind the scenes:

• Hosted checkout — when a customer picks Paddle, the plugin opens a Paddle-hosted checkout (mobile-friendly, supports all Paddle’s payment methods). No iframes, no PCI scope.
• Recurring subscriptions — Paddle owns the subscription lifecycle. Acelle pulls current state on demand and renders it in the existing subscription pages.
• Pull-only sync — no webhook setup required. The plugin does not expose a public callback URL. State is fetched from Paddle when admin/customer opens a subscription page, plus a periodic sync job runs hourly. This means no SSL on a callback subdomain, no HMAC verification, no dedup tables, no queue workers dedicated to webhooks.

Feature highlights

• ✅ Drop-in installation — upload the ZIP through Acelle’s standard plugin installer; activate with one click
• ✅ Sandbox + Production environments selectable per gateway
• ✅ Paddle Billing API — current generation, not Paddle Classic (see compatibility note below)
• ✅ Recurring subscriptions with renewal sync, cancellation sync, plan-change sync
• ✅ One-off transactions also supported
• ✅ Plan ↔ Paddle Price mapping through Acelle’s existing Remote Plan Mapping screen
• ✅ Saved payment-method display at customer checkout (card brand + last 4)
• ✅ Connection test on save — if your API key is wrong, you find out before any customer hits checkout
• ✅ Multi-tenant friendly — each Acelle tenant can configure its own Paddle account
• ✅ Disable without uninstall — flip the plugin to inactive and Paddle disappears from the gateway picker; existing rows are preserved
• ✅ Translated — English included; ships with translation hooks so your installed Acelle language packs (FR, DE, ES, ZH, …) auto-cover the new strings