What is Polar?

Polar offers a comprehensive payment infrastructure tailored for the modern digital economy, enabling businesses and developers to efficiently sell SaaS subscriptions and digital products. It simplifies the complexities of online sales by providing robust tools for creating flexible pricing models, including one-time purchases, recurring subscriptions, and sophisticated usage-based billing. This allows sellers to accurately charge for metered services, such as API calls or LLM token usage, through a precise event ingestion system.

The platform streamlines the entire sales lifecycle, from easy payment integration and customer management to automated delivery of product benefits. Sellers can configure benefits like license keys, access to digital downloads, GitHub repositories, or Discord communities, which are automatically granted upon purchase. A key advantage is Polar's role as a global merchant of record, which means it handles all aspects of tax compliance, including VAT, Sales Tax, and GST, allowing creators to focus on their products rather than on administrative burdens.

Features

Digital Products & SaaS Billing: Create and sell digital products and SaaS subscriptions with flexible pricing models (one-time, recurring) and seamless payment processing.
Usage-Based Billing: Implement precise metered billing for services through a robust event ingestion API, including strategies for LLM (e.g., GPT-4o) usage.
Benefits Engine: Automate the delivery of entitlements like license keys, credits, downloadable files, GitHub repository access, and Discord roles upon purchase.
Customer Management: Streamline the customer lifecycle with detailed profiles and analytics for managing subscribers and buyers.
Global Merchant of Record: Handles all tax compliance, including Sales Tax, VAT, and GST, simplifying global sales for vendors.
Simple Checkouts: Provides streamlined checkout experiences with custom fields, automatic tax calculation, and options for embeddable links.
Automated Product Benefits: Configure and automatically grant access to digital goods or services post-purchase.
Open Source Integrations: Offers integrations with popular developer tools like Raycast, Framer, and Zapier, and provides command-line tools for quick setup.

Use Cases

Selling SaaS subscriptions with various pricing plans.
Distributing and monetizing digital products like e-books, software, or online courses.
Implementing pay-as-you-go billing for API usage or other metered services.
Managing customer subscriptions and one-time purchases from a unified platform.
Automating the delivery of software license keys or access to exclusive content after payment.
Expanding sales globally without the burden of managing international tax regulations.
Integrating a complete payment and billing solution into web applications using APIs or CLI tools.

FAQs

What kind of products can I sell with Polar?

You can sell SaaS subscriptions, digital products with one-time purchases, and services that require usage-based billing.
How does Polar handle tax compliance?

Polar acts as your Global Merchant of Record, managing all sales tax, VAT, GST, and other tax compliance aspects on your behalf.
What are automated product benefits in Polar?

Automated product benefits are features like license keys, digital downloads, access to GitHub repositories, or invitations to Discord servers that are automatically granted to customers when they purchase your product.
Is Polar an open-source platform?

Yes, Polar is built as an open-source platform, emphasizing transparency and community involvement.
What integrations does Polar offer?

Polar provides open source integrations, including a Raycast Extension, Framer Plugin, and Zapier Integration, along with command-line tools for easier setup.