That was my understanding after becoming aware of this, and Paddle seems to be popping up a lot.

>using a merchant of record will become the dominant mechanism for accepting online payments, at least for smaller online businesses with significant international or inter-state sales.

That's our case. It wasn't much of a problem for our consulting activities (mainly mid six-figure contracts with a few clients, mainly in Europe, often repeat business). However, we launched a product and it's surprisingly more straightforward to charge someone 250k than to charge many a few hundred bucks here and there. At least for now. VAT on a large invoice, bank-to-bank and accounting firm, it's just part of business. VAT on SaaS for a few hundred euros via a credit card? Something else, but I digress. We've been learning.

>The tax products offered by Stripe and a few specialist providers seem to offer little more than tracking some VAT rates and doing some simple calculations. I don't understand who the target market is supposed to be for these services today.

Again, you hit the nail on the head as to our situation. I had looked at Stripe "Tax" before, but I couldn't understand it really: it appeared like a landing page with a calculator behind, but that is unfair because I haven't looked at it closely and haven't tried it yet. The impression was that it was less fully-fledged than Paddle, but I'm more than willing to be wrong because it would mean that I'll only use Stripe for everything (for now, then I'll handle the problem of the eventuality of them shutting down our account or something like that and figure out contingencies / payment hot-swapping).

>Anyone who doesn't have those resources might prefer to outsource everything (including responsibility for compliance) to specialists who offer a comprehensive service.

That's my case. If you have a few contracts per year for large amounts, I can do that easily: we use an accounting firm, simple invoices, bank transfers, everything is neat. But for a large number of small amounts, I want to buy the option of not doing accounting.

That desire is so deep, that it even influenced our product. It's a machine learning platform that lets people train, track, package, deploy, and monitor machine learning on their Kubernetes clusters.[0]

Why their Kubernetes clusters? Because it's a good way to charge a flat rate instead of counting beans: if we provide compute, we'll have to meter it, or charge a flat rate and play the large numbers game (many using it less subsidize those who over use it). We wanted to have nothing to do with that metered billing, especially on infrastructure costs, and we just let users do things on their own clusters and data.

- [0]: https://iko.ai