“What can I help with?”
If you haven’t seen this prompt on your screen, you may have been living under a rock for the past two years. For everyone else, this is the instantly recognizable greeting from OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
It goes without saying that AI is more than just hype or a passing phase. In fact, it has permanently altered the way we work, shop, write, research, and even think. The global AI market is projected to swell from over $638 billion in 2024 to $3.68 trillion by 2034, and with 71% of organizations now using generative AI, global expansion isn’t just an opportunity — it’s a necessity.
So, what can high-growth AI companies do to break into these markets effectively while remaining compliant with local, rapidly changing legislation?
Luckily, FastSpring has the answer.
These companies need a strategy to navigate the complex global tax, payments, and compliance landscape. As your SaaS, API, or token-based service becomes accessible worldwide, your team is suddenly liable for a tangled web of complex regulations.
This is where most AI startups get stuck. They are forced to divert precious engineering resources to build and maintain a global billing and tax compliance machine. For this reason, they often deploy a basic Stripe implementation; however, time and again, companies realize that Stripe costs more and doesn’t account for all the challenges and complexity that come with a global sales strategy.
Instead, partnering with a full-stack merchant of record (MoR) such as FastSpring removes the operational burden of payments, taxes, and subscriptions, so you can focus on enhancing your product and increasing market share.
Global Compliance Is Not One Size Fits All
While your team is focused on training models rules, a different set of rules is coming for your company as you expand globally: tax and regulatory compliance. And for AI companies, this challenge is even more acute than it is for traditional SaaS.
Take global sales tax for example. This is the most immediate and costly challenge. If you sell digital services to a customer in the European Union, you are required to collect VAT at the buyer’s local rate (which, at the time of writing, varies from 17% to 27%) and then file those collected taxes with the correct authorities.
The shift away from simple compliance isn’t unique to the EU. In the United States, the rules are even more fragmented. Sales tax rules for digital services vary by state. Some states, such as Colorado, even allow individual counties and cities to set their own tax rates, resulting in thousands of potential tax jurisdictions. Each one requires a separate filing.
Failing to manage this tax complexity not only risks fines but also compromises your ability to operate.
Beyond taxes, your checkout itself becomes a barrier:
- Localized Payments: Credit cards are not king everywhere. In the Netherlands, customers prefer iDEAL. In Brazil, it’s PIX. Failing to offer these payment methods risks a high cart abandonment rate.
- Localized Currencies: 76% of shoppers prefer sites that display pricing in their home currency. Failing to do so kills conversion.
- Data Governance: You will be responsible for processing payment data securely in accordance with regional requirements, such as PCI compliance.
Why AI Is Different
In the payments world, AI is increasingly being treated as a high-risk category. The AI industry, especially B2C tools, is far more prone to high chargeback rates. A user might dispute a charge because they “didn’t like” the quality of the generated text or art, claiming it wasn’t what they were promised.
This means AI companies don’t just need a payment solution — they need a sophisticated partner with intelligent models to manage this new and specific type of risk.
When an AI company partners with a trusted merchant of record such as FastSpring, it gains a crucial advantage. FastSpring maintains dedicated, advanced risk models that actively prevent unwarranted chargebacks. More importantly, partnering with an established MoR provides immediate payment credibility with banks and acquirers.
This credibility translates directly to better approval rates.
The reason is twofold: First, you gain a known, respected partner advocating on your behalf; second, the millions of successful transactions flowing through FastSpring’s trusted network signal to banks that they are processing on behalf of a reliable entity. Ultimately, higher approval rates mean less lost revenue and more profit in your pocket.
How FastSpring Solves for AI Scaling
At FastSpring, we know that seamless compliance and checkout transactions drive conversion and revenue. As your merchant of record, FastSpring becomes the legal seller of your product. The moment a customer clicks “Buy,” they are purchasing from us.
Our goal is simple: to give you the compliance and payment infrastructure that generates meaningful revenue so that you can focus on your code.
- Comprehensive Product and Entitlement Management: FastSpring provides robust in-app tools to manage your entire product catalog, including subscriptions, coupons, and promotional offers. We go further by integrating directly with your backend systems; this ensures that your internal usage monitoring doesn’t just track costs — it actively informs subscription status, controlling product access and feature availability automatically.
- Complete, Offloaded Tax and Compliance: You don’t need to register for VAT in Spain, calculate sales tax in rural Colorado, or remit payments to the Japanese government. FastSpring does all that. We are responsible for calculating, collecting, and filing all global sales taxes and VAT.
- Global Payment Localization: Our platform comes pre-integrated with international payment methods and major currencies. We automatically detect the user’s location and offer them the currencies and payment types they trust, including iDEAL, Pix, UPI, Kakao Pay, and more.
- Intelligent Fraud Prevention and Risk Management: Because FastSpring processes billions of dollars in secure traffic, our reputation with banks can help drive higher authorization rates. Our intelligent fraud models are tuned to identify and block bad actors, reducing your chargebacks and mitigating the cross-border payment risk that is unique to the AI industry.
- Flexible Billing for AI Models: FastSpring provides robust tools to facilitate sophisticated subscription management, perfectly suited for metered and usage-based AI services. For example, with FastSpring’s Managed Subscriptions, your system retains control over billing logic. Your platform monitors customer usage (tokens used, compute time, API calls, etc.) and then leverages our API to dynamically set the price and trigger the charge. This seamless integration allows you to bill variable, usage-based amounts on your own schedule — while offloading all the underlying payment and compliance complexity to us.
- Full-Service Payment Support: If a customer has a problem with a payment, our global support team handles it, not yours.
Go Global With FastSpring
Expanding into new markets doesn’t have to be complex. Your company’s core mission is to build groundbreaking AI, not to become an expert in EU VAT returns.
With FastSpring’s Merchant of Record platform, you get a partner that handles the entire complexity of global commerce. You can tap into high-growth economies, reduce cart abandonment, and increase revenue, all while dedicating 100% of your resources to building the future of AI.
Book a demo today to see how our AI-specific solution protects your revenue and empowers sustainable growth.
