PolarA87
Merchant of Record · Independent developers and small SaaS teams selling globally who want tax, invoicing and chargebacks handle…
Overview
$47
Best for: Independent developers and small SaaS teams selling globally who want tax, invoicing and chargebacks handled for them; products with usage-based or metered billing, licence keys or downloadable files; teams already building on Next.js, Nuxt, TanStack Start or Laravel, where Polar's adapters do most of the integration; and sellers who opened an account before 27 May 2026 and can keep the Early Member rate.
Strengths
- + Every fee is published — platform rate by plan, the 1.5% international-card surcharge, the $15 dispute fee, the Stripe payout fees passed through at cost — with no sales call and no volume-negotiated secrecy.
- + A full merchant of record: Polar is the legal seller, so global sales tax and VAT registration, collection and remittance, invoicing and chargeback liability are its problem, not yours.
- + Built for developers — usage-based billing, licence keys, file delivery, GitHub access and a checkout that drops into a Next.js, Nuxt, TanStack Start or Laravel app in a few lines, with widely praised SDKs and documentation.
- + The whole platform is open source under Apache 2.0, so the code that bills your customers is inspectable and the roadmap is public.
- + Early users were grandfathered, not repriced: organisations created before 27 May 2026 keep 4% + 40¢ indefinitely, and the paid plans give larger sellers a way to get below 4% without negotiating.
- + Credible backing for a young company — a $10 million seed round led by Accel in June 2025, with angel investors from Shopify, Vercel, Supabase, Raycast, Resend and Framer — and a founder who built and sold Tictail and ran product for Shopify's Shop app.
Trade-offs
- – The price advantage is gone for newcomers. Since 27 May 2026 the free tier costs 5% + 50¢ — the same as Paddle and Lemon Squeezy — and getting back to roughly the old rate means paying $20 to $400 a month.
- – New organisations wait seven days before funds can be withdrawn, payouts are manual rather than scheduled, and the terms allow Polar to hold funds for up to 120 days on risk grounds.
- – The extras stack: 1.5% on non-US cards, $15 per dispute that is not returned when you win, Stripe's $2-a-month and 0.25% + 25¢ payout fees, and no refund of the platform fee when you refund a customer.
- – Failed-payment recovery is a fixed flow — four retries over 21 days with Polar's own emails — whose cadence and messages you cannot change (only the grace period is configurable), where Stripe and Paddle let you own it.
- – Support is thin. Public reviews and community threads through 2026 describe slow or unanswered support requests, and there is no phone line or SLA.
- – It is a seed-stage company that launched its billing platform in September 2024, can terminate on 30 days' notice, and reserves the right to suspend accounts whose chargeback rate approaches 0.7%; sellers are also limited to the countries Stripe Connect supports.
Fees in detail
- Online rate: Starter (free): 5% + 50¢ per transaction; Pro ($20/month): 3.8% + 40¢; Growth ($100/month): 3.6% + 35¢; Scale ($400/month): 3.4% + 30¢. Orga
- International: +1.5% on international (non-US) cards. Payouts through Stripe carry Stripe's currency-conversion fee of 0.25% in the EU and up to 1% elsewhe
- Disputes: $$15 per dispute, deducted from balance regardless of outcome
Standard published rate for a domestic online card payment. Confirm current pricing on Polar's pricing page.
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