Polar
Open-source merchant-of-record billing for developers and AI-native SaaS.
About
Polar is an open-source merchant-of-record platform that lets developers sell software with minimal integration work. As the merchant of record it handles global sales tax and VAT compliance, subscriptions, one-time purchases, usage-based billing, license keys, and digital product delivery, with SDKs in TypeScript, Python, and Go.
Founded by Birk Jernstrom, whose previous startup Tictail was acquired by Shopify, Polar raised a $10M seed round led by Accel in June 2025 and positions itself around AI-era billing: per-token usage metering, inference cost pass-through, and usage caps are first-class features. The codebase is Apache 2.0 and the platform has become one of the most talked-about Stripe alternatives in the indie and open-source developer community.
What it can do
- Merchant-of-record billing with global tax handling
- Usage-based billing including AI token metering
- License keys, entitlements, and digital products
- TypeScript, Python, and Go SDKs with webhooks
Setup
Create an account at polar.sh, create products and prices, and integrate checkout with the SDK or hosted checkout links.
Prerequisites
A product to sell and a Polar account.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Verified via vendor site/docs/GitHub and reputable coverage, wave 96; Trending score 84/100 from researcher assessment.
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.