For businesses

Common Questions

General

What is tiun?

tiun is the backend for the AI engineering era. It is an ecosystem of services built to work together from day one, covering Authentication, Payments, Customer Database, and Product Analytics. Software teams and their AI agents can spin up an entire backend in minutes instead of wiring together four or five separate tools. tiun is also your Merchant of Record, it handles the commercial layer (tax, payouts, chargebacks) on your behalf.

Who is tiun for?

tiun is built for SaaS and AI companies selling digital products globally. The shape of the team doesn't matter, what matters is whether you're shipping software or AI services and want a single backend for auth, payments, customer data and analytics

Solo builders and indie hackers shipping their first SaaS or AI product use tiun to skip the integration work entirely. Install the GitHub Skill, point your AI agent at it, go live right away.

Small teams and growing startups use tiun to avoid the typical 5-tool stack (Auth0 + Stripe + Stripe Tax + a Supabase + Statsig) and the engineering time to keep those tools in sync.

Enterprise customers including multi-billion dollar companies in Germany use tiun for the same reasons, plus our Enterprise plan adds multiple IBANs, custom payout schedules, dedicated technical support, SLAs, and security audits with their legal teams.

tiun probably isn't for you if you're selling physical goods, running a marketplace with third-party sellers, building an in-person retail business, or have highly complex sales-led enterprise contracts paid by wire transfer outside a checkout flow.

How am I faster with tiun?

Three things.

Faster to launch. You integrate one system instead of four, and because tiun is built to be driven by AI agents through an MCP server and a GitHub skill, your agent can set up and configure the backend directly. You go live in minutes.

Faster to run. There is no webhook logic, no business logic, and no automated workflows to build or maintain between auth, billing, your customer database, and analytics, because they are already one system. Less to keep running means less of your team's time spent on upkeep.

Faster to improve. Because user data, payment data, and product data live in one system, tiun keeps surfacing what to improve and what to build next. The value compounds after launch instead of stopping at setup.

What does tiun replace?

A typical stack runs an auth provider, a payments processor, a customer/CRM database, and an analytics tool as four separate products, each integrated and maintained on its own. tiun is all four as one system. No webhook logic, no business logic, and no automated workflows to build between them, and no data silos.

How tiun works

What does Merchant of Record mean for me?

Any business that sells to customers globally is responsible for complying with the law wherever the customer buys, and those rules differ from one country and jurisdiction to the next.

As your Merchant of Record, tiun is the legal seller of your product to the end customer. That means tiun, not you, is responsible for charging the customer, collecting and remitting the correct sales tax or VAT, and handling chargebacks. You receive payouts and focus on your product. In practice it removes the tax, compliance, and payment-liability burden that you would otherwise have to carry yourself.

Why one system instead of multiple tools?

When auth, payments, your customer database, and analytics are separate tools, the data lives in separate silos and you spend effort keeping them in sync. tiun runs them as one system, so a user, their payments, and their product usage are connected by default. That connection is what makes setup faster and what lets tiun give you recommendations a single-purpose tool cannot.

How does tiun turn my data into recommendations?

tiun keeps user data, payment data, and product usage in one system, so it sees the whole picture at once: who your users are, what they pay, and how they use the product. Separate tools cannot connect those signals. tiun can.

This works as a prompt feature. You ask tiun a question in plain language and it correlates your user, payment, and usage data to answer, turning what would be scattered metrics across separate tools into clear next steps: what to improve and what to build next.

The next generation of great companies will be small teams with big ideas. AI has turned efficiency and productivity into a commodity, so speed alone is no longer the edge. The winners will be the sharpest innovators and the fastest executors, and both come down to one thing: seeing what your competition cannot. tiun shows you exactly that.

Speed and Integration

How long does it take to integrate?

The agent setup path is designed to get a basic backend running in about five minutes. Full production readiness depends on your product, but the core - auth, a checkout, your customer database, analytics - is intended to be live right away.

Can my AI agent integrate tiun?

Yes. tiun exposes an MCP server and a GitHub skill, so AI agents (in Cursor or similar) can read the setup and configure your backend directly rather than you copying snippets by hand. This is a core part of how the five-minute setup works.

What frameworks are supported?

The tiun SDK works with any JavaScript framework or vanilla JS — React, Vue, Next.js, Nuxt, plain HTML/JS, and more. See the SDK examples for framework-specific setup.

Payments, Payout and Invoicing

What payment methods does tiun support?

tiun supports all major credit and debit cards (Visa, Mastercard, American Express) plus the most-used digital wallets and alternative payment methods: Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Klarna, Revolut Pay, TWINT, Bluecode, WERO and carrier billing. New methods are added regularly based on what our customers ask for.

How are payouts made?

Payouts are processed directly through tiun. You receive net revenue after fees and taxes, sent to your bank account via the most efficient local rails in supported countries. Default schedule is monthly with a $200 minimum. Enterprise plans support custom schedules and multiple IBANs.

Who handles refunds, chargebacks, and fraud?

Because tiun is the Merchant of Record, tiun manages chargebacks and the associated risk and liability. Refunds are also issued through tiun. Fraud screening runs on transactions before they complete.

Can my customers access their invoices and receipts?

Yes. Both business and private customers can access, view, or download their receipts and invoices. No support tickets required.

For B2B customers, tiun generates compliant invoices automatically under our Merchant of Record model, including EU B2B reverse charge invoices where applicable. For private customers, tiun issues compliant receipts that meet local consumer requirements.

Recurring subscriptions, one-time purchases, and usage-based charges all generate invoices automatically, every transaction your customer makes is documented and available to them on demand.

Does tiun support enterprise invoicing?

Not today. If you close a $50k enterprise contract on a sales call and want to send the customer a PDF invoice with your bank details for them to pay by wire transfer outside tiun's checkout, that flow is not supported. Every transaction needs to be initiated through tiun's checkout to be invoiced properly under our Merchant of Record model.

Tax and Compliance

Do you handle sales tax and VAT for me?

Yes. As your Merchant of Record, tiun calculates taxes in real time at checkout and collects and remits VAT, GST, and sales tax across global jurisdictions. tiun assumes the tax liability, so you are never the entity audited and you never file these taxes yourself for sales made through tiun.

Do you handle EU VAT reverse charge for business to business transactions?

Yes. EU B2B reverse charge is handled correctly under our Merchant of Record model.

For context: under the EU reverse charge mechanism, when a business in one EU country sells digital services to a VAT-registered business in another EU country, the seller does not charge VAT. Instead, the buyer accounts for VAT in their own country at their local rate (this is called "reverse charging" the tax). It is a critical piece of EU B2B SaaS compliance, and getting it wrong means either overcharging your customers or owing tax you did not collect.

tiun validates the customer's VAT ID at checkout, applies the reverse charge automatically when the conditions are met, and issues a compliant invoice that includes the required reverse charge notation.

Is tiun GDPR compliant?

Yes. tiun is hosted in Europe and GDPR compliant by default. Customer data is stored in EU data centers. We maintain a public list of sub-processors, and your customers' data rights (access, rectification, deletion, portability) are honored.

In practice, several of our customers are multi-billion-dollar companies in Germany with large legal departments and regular audit cycles. tiun goes through their security and compliance audits as part of doing business with them, which means our practices are continuously vetted against the bar that enterprise compliance teams set.

One thing to be clear about: tiun gives you everything you need to operate in a GDPR-compliant way, including a DPA, the public sub-processor list, and built-in tools to honor data access, rectification, deletion, and portability requests. Acting on those tools and meeting your own obligations as the controller of your customers' data is ultimately your responsibility.

Pricing

What does tiun cost?

Comparison

Do I still need Stripe if I use tiun?

No. tiun includes payment processing and acts as your Merchant of Record. You do not manage a Stripe account, do not pay Stripe directly, and do not build on Stripe's API. In some countries we use Stripe as one of the PSPs under the hood for credit card processing, but that is our integration to manage, not yours.

Why not just use Stripe directly?

Stripe handles payments. You still need to build or buy authentication, manage entitlements, keep billing and access in sync, maintain webhook logic, and build a customer-facing self-serve portal. tiun is the system you would otherwise build on top of Stripe. For more information please refer to the tiun vs. stripe comparison page.

How does tiun compare to Polar, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, and Stripe Managed Payments?

Polar, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, and Stripe Managed Payments are billing platforms with Merchant of Record. tiun is broader: authentication, a customer database, and analytics are included alongside billing and MoR. tiun is also priced lower on the all-in transaction rate.

For more information please visit our pricing page or our pricing comparison table.

Account and leaving

How do I migrate to tiun?

If you're coming from another billing provider, like Stripe, Paddle, Polar, Lemon Squeezy, or a DIY stack, the best place to start is by joining our Discord or emailing support@tiun.app. Our team will walk you through how to get started and what to expect for your specific setup. For complex migrations, our Enterprise plan includes a dedicated technical team to help plan and execute the switch.