Polar
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Polar is a merchant of record (MoR) for software companies, built on top of Stripe. That last part is the whole story: Polar is not an alternative payment processor, it is a layer on one. It runs checkout, subscriptions, and billing, and in exchange for a materially higher per-transaction fee than a raw processor, it becomes the seller of record on every transaction and takes on the liability for capturing and remitting international sales tax — VAT, GST, US sales tax — jurisdiction by jurisdiction.
The decision that is expensive to get wrong
Being a merchant of record is a different legal arrangement from being your own merchant on a processor, not a pricing tier of the same thing. If you integrate Stripe directly, you are the seller of record and you are liable for registering, collecting, and filing sales tax in every jurisdiction where you cross a threshold — a compliance burden many companies quietly under-invest in. If you go through Polar, Polar absorbs that liability by reselling your product, at the cost of flexibility, control over pricing and business models, and a higher take rate. Retrofitting this decision later means migrating customers, subscriptions, and tax registration state, not swapping an SDK. Decide before writing the integration, not after finding out who owes VAT.
Constraints that surprise people
- Payouts run through Stripe Connect underneath, and are subject to a settlement delay before funds are withdrawable — the exact delay and minimum payout thresholds per currency have changed over time and vary by account creation date, so do not assume last year's numbers still hold.
- Fees have multiple tiers (a free plan and paid plans that trade a monthly fee for a lower per-transaction rate), and the breakeven point between tiers depends on volume — do not assume a single flat rate applies.
- Polar's benefit system (license keys, file downloads, Discord/GitHub access grants) is not a generic entitlements engine; each benefit type has its own grant/revoke lifecycle and webhook events.
What to verify rather than recall
Fee percentages, payout thresholds and delays, supported countries, and webhook event names all change and are easy to misstate from memory. Confirm exact figures and the current event list against the mirrored corpus under references/vendor/ rather than asserting a remembered number.