| Category | Function | Share | Rank | Negative rate | Labels | Quadrant | Since September 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Merchants of record | Receivables and billing | 14% | 3 of 45 | 10% | 49 | accepted challenger |
| Model | First choice | Alternative | Mention | Negative | Labels |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
| GPT-5.4 mini | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash | 0 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 5 |
| Perplexity Sonar | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 3 |
| Grok 4.1 Fast | 0 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 6 |
| Mistral Small | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 3 |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 5 |
| Llama 4 Maverick | 0 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 3 |
| Qwen 3.7 Flash | 1 | 2 | 0 | 1 | 4 |
| Kimi K2 | 0 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 4 |
| GLM 4.7 FlashX | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
| MiniMax M2.5 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| GPT-6 Luna | 0 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| Muse Glimmer 30B | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 3 |
Verbatim evidence the judge attached to positive labels.
“If your B2B offering includes a mix of software licenses, implementation services, and physical devices, FastSpring is arguably the most flexible backend.” Qwen 3.7 Flash · Merchants of record · direct prompt · first choice
“FastSpring is the better fit for small-to-mid-size software sellers who want a faster, more self-serve setup.” Muse Glimmer 30B · Merchants of record · paraphrase prompt · first choice
“Top Pick: FastSpring ... I'd recommend FastSpring as the best all-around Merchant of Record” DeepSeek V4 Flash · Merchants of record · paraphrase prompt · first choice
“Paddle and FastSpring are top choices for small businesses with limited budgets” Mistral Small · Merchants of record · budget prompt · first choice
Verbatim evidence attached to negative labels. A warning on a product with few labels is a warning; on a product with many, it is one voice among them.
“Avoid for tiny budgets: Enterprise-focused like FastSpring (quote-based, higher effective)” Grok 4.1 Fast · Merchants of record · budget prompt · hard negative
“FastSpring is more likely to shut down your account and withhold funds for 180 days” Qwen 3.7 Flash · Merchants of record · negative prompt · hard negative
“Caveat: Some users note its legacy infrastructure can be less flexible than newer competitors like Paddle” DeepSeek V4 Flash · Merchants of record · direct prompt · soft negative
“FastSpring: Doesn't publish standard rates publicly; fees are reportedly ~5.9% + $0.95 per transaction” Kimi K2 · Merchants of record · negative prompt · soft negative
Citations exist only for the models that return a source list, five of the fourteen in this edition, so these counts come from 145 of the 151 answers that named FastSpring and are not a share of its labels.
556 of the 602 domain citations in answers naming FastSpring came from somebody else's page.
Pages are listed as the models cited them.
Search figures are US estimates from DataForSEO, read October 5, 2026; AI search demand is its modeled, directional estimate, not a count of queries to any assistant. The answers are this edition's. Two measurements side by side: neither is read as the cause of the other.
| Kind | Pages | Last 90 days | 2025-10 to 2026-09 | Latest | Categories named |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blog | 715 | 22 | 2026-09-28 | Accounting software | |
| Case study | 39 | 1 | 2026-08-17 | ||
| Webinar or virtual event | 23 | 1 | 2026-07-28 | ||
| Comparison | 20 | 1 | 2026-07-16 | ||
| News or press | 20 | 0 | 2026-05-01 | ||
| Conference or event | 14 | 3 | 2026-09-03 | ||
| Podcast or video | 12 | 1 | 2026-08-21 | ||
| Glossary or explainer | 7 | 1 | 2026-07-28 | ||
| Template or tool | 3 | undated | |||
| Report or ebook | 2 | 0 | 2022-10-24 |
Every page fastspring.com exposes, subdomains included. Kind is read from the address and title. The last 90 days, the latest date and the twelve months count pages by when they were published, from the site's feeds, a date in the address, or the page's own publication date, read from up to a hundred of its most recently changed pages; a page that says only when it last changed is counted in its kind but not in when, so the recent counts are a floor, and a kind none of whose pages gives a publication date reads undated. An event counts as online when its address or title says so (webinar, on demand, virtual or online summit); a conference, summit, trade show, expo or roadshow that does not say so is counted as a conference or event, which on a vendor's site is mostly in person. Read September 29, 2026.
An email the morning each edition publishes: where this product moved, where it held, and by how much against the noise floor. One address, confirmed by a click; a stop link in every email.
Already following? Everything you follow, with a stop for each.
What FastSpring's own pages state, read October 5, 2026: fastspring.com, fastspring.com/pricing, trust.fastspring.com, fastspring.com/solutions/ai, fastspring.com/customers. A claimed page can correct any of them.
Claiming is free and changes nothing in the data. A claimed page shows a verified contact who is told when each edition publishes and when FastSpring's standing changes by more than the noise floor; the right to propose corrections to the vendor table, meaning names the judge wrote that should or should not read as FastSpring, applied by version and listed in the change log; and a one-line description supplied by the vendor and marked as such.
A new claim receives the current edition's vendor brief for FastSpring by email, built from the raw record of the edition. It shows:
FastSpring is among the products AI models recommend first in Merchants of record this edition. Each badge says so in the buyer's words, names the edition, and links to the standing. The next edition issues a new badge; this one stays true as a record of October 2026.
Badges read on light and dark pages. Alt text carries the claim, the category, the edition and the index, so it stays a citation where the image does not load.