SparkPay vs Stripe Billing entitlements and Schematic
SparkPay is not a Stripe alternative. It runs on your own Stripe account, you keep your customers and your money, and Stripe’s processing fees are paid exactly as they are today. What it replaces is the layer above that: the pricing page, the checkout wiring, the plan limits and the feature gating.
So the real comparison is against the two other ways to get that layer: Stripe Billing’s own Entitlements API, and a dedicated entitlements platform like Schematic.
| SparkPay | Stripe Billing entitlements | Schematic | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it costs | $5 Essentials, $9 Founder, $29 Growth, per month flat | 0.7% of billing volume, or from £450/mo on a 1-year contract | Free, then $400/mo Growth ($320/mo billed yearly) |
| Free tier | Yes, up to $1,000 processed, badge on checkout | No separate free tier, Billing is priced from the first invoice | Yes, up to $5,000/mo billing volume, 2 custom plans |
| Cost at $10,000/mo processed | $9/mo on Founder, it does not scale with volume | $70/mo at 0.7% | $400/mo, past the free tier at $5,000 |
| Stripe processing fees | Paid to Stripe as normal, on your own account | Paid to Stripe as normal | Paid to Stripe as normal |
| Who holds the Stripe account and the money | You do, always | You do | You do |
| Hosted pricing page | Yes, on every tier including free | Pricing table embed, or build your own | Yes, components |
| Type-safe gating kit in your codebase | Yes, on every tier including free | Entitlements API, you write the guards | Yes, SDKs and flags |
| Usage governance, audit logs, RBAC | No | Partial, through the Stripe dashboard | Yes, and it is what they are built around |
| Tax, VAT and revenue recognition | No, use Stripe Tax | Yes, Stripe Tax and Revenue Recognition as paid add-ons | No, it sits on your billing provider |
| Support | Email, from the person who wrote it | First-party, with paid support tiers | Email, and premium support on Enterprise |
Competitor pricing read from stripe.com/gb/billing/pricing and schematichq.com/pricing in November 2026. Stripe’s £450 monthly figure is its UK annual-contract plan covering up to £70,000 of billing volume a month. All three sit on top of ordinary Stripe processing fees, which none of them replace. Plans change, so check theirs before deciding.
When Stripe on its own is the answer
If you need Stripe Tax, Revenue Recognition or Smart Retries, you are buying Stripe Billing regardless, and its Entitlements API is included. At low volume 0.7% is also genuinely cheap: below roughly $1,300 a month in billing volume it costs less than SparkPay's $9 tier. You will write the gating and the pricing page yourself.
When Schematic is the answer
Buy Schematic if entitlements are a company-wide concern rather than a feature: usage governance your customers can see, per-customer plan overrides, audit log retention, role-based access, multiple environments. Its free tier is also more generous than ours at $5,000 a month in volume. Growth is $400 a month, which is a different budget to ours.
When SparkPay is the answer
A solo developer or a small team shipping several products who wants the pricing page, the checkout and the typed gating done rather than started, for a flat fee that does not grow with revenue. $9 a month covers three apps. Past about $1,300 a month in billing volume the flat fee is the cheaper of the three, and it stays flat after that.