Polar
Depot pick for ai-merchant-of-record. Prefer Stripe when you already have tax/ops staff; OpenMeter/Kong when…
Depot pick for ai-merchant-of-record. Prefer Stripe when you already have tax/ops staff; OpenMeter/Kong when metering is internal-only. Strengths: Public MoR fee ladder (no sales-gated volume theater); Built for AI usage/seat/credit billing in one afternoon; OSS + strong agent/docs surface.
Lock-in risk: higher = more lock-in (worse). Overall already inverts this dimension.
Depot pick for ai-merchant-of-record. Prefer Stripe when you already have tax/ops staff; OpenMeter/Kong when metering is internal-only.
Strengths
- · Public MoR fee ladder (no sales-gated volume theater)
- · Built for AI usage/seat/credit billing in one afternoon
- · OSS + strong agent/docs surface
Weaknesses
- · MoR fees higher than raw Stripe for US-only simple SaaS
- · Younger than Stripe Billing at enterprise edge cases
- · Payouts still ride Stripe rails/fees
Pricing notes
As of 2026-09-14 (polar.sh/resources/pricing): Merchant of Record. Starter free at 5%+$0.50/txn; Pro $20/mo + 3.8%+$0.40; Growth $100 + 3.6%+$0.35; Scale $400 + 3.4%+$0.30. Orgs before 2026-05-27 keep Early Member 4%+$0.40 (+0.5% subscriptions). +1.5% international cards. Usage metering for tokens/API/GPU events; LLMStrategy for Vercel AI SDK.
Sourced pricing
Contract status unavailable · no_sourced_price. Single normalized $/1M: null. Machine list: /api/pricing?provider=polar
No sourced SKU row. Notes above stay prose.
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