Polar vs Stripe
Both are finance tools. Here is what separates them.
What Polar is
Polar is a billing and payments platform that acts as the merchant of record for the seller. Polar Software, Inc. registers as the reseller in the relevant jurisdictions, so it, not you, collects and remits VAT, GST and US sales tax. EU business-to-business sales with a valid VAT ID are handled under the reverse charge rule. You remain responsible for income tax on your own revenue in your own country. Signing up is free and needs no credit card, but account approval goes through a merchant of record and KYC review that usually takes about a week. What a sale costs is built from several parts rather than a single rate, and the headline percentage falls as the monthly fee rises. Starter has no monthly fee and charges 5 percent plus 0.50 US dollars per transaction. Pro costs 20 US dollars a month and charges 3.8 percent plus 0.40. Growth costs 100 US dollars a month for 3.6 percent plus 0.35. Scale costs 400 US dollars a month for 3.4 percent plus 0.30, and is the only tier with a shared Slack channel and prioritised support. Surcharges then stack on top: cards issued outside the United States add 1.5 percent, cross-border currency conversion costs 0.25 percent within the EU and 1 percent elsewhere, and a dispute or chargeback costs 15 US dollars whatever the outcome. Transaction fees are not returned when an order is refunded, in full or in part. Payouts run through Stripe Connect Express or a manual withdrawal, and Polar never moves the balance automatically. Stripe payouts cost 2 US dollars per month per active payout, plus 0.25 percent and 0.25 US dollars per payout, and Stripe's minimum payout amount per currency means anything below it stays on the balance until next time. More than 130 currencies are supported and checkout picks the currency from the buyer's location, with orders converted to US dollars at the time of the transaction. Unusually for this category, the Polar codebase is open source under the Apache 2.0 licence. Products can be one-time purchases or subscriptions, priced as fixed, pay what you want with an optional minimum, free, metered usage or per-seat, with intervals from daily to yearly. Two decisions are permanent: the billing interval and the pricing type are locked once a product is created, and existing subscribers stay on the price they signed up at when a price changes. Benefits automate delivery of what the customer bought: licence keys, feature flags, file downloads up to 10 GB, private GitHub repository access and Discord invites with roles. There are SDKs for JavaScript or TypeScript and for Python, plus adapters for frameworks including Next.js, Nuxt, SvelteKit, Astro and Laravel. The customer portal is hosted by Polar under your own slug and cannot be switched off, so part of the customer relationship sits on Polar's domain rather than yours.
What Stripe is
Stripe is a payments platform that businesses use to take card payments online and in person, and to run the billing, invoicing, tax and payout work that sits around them. It accepts payments in more than 135 currencies and supports more than 125 payment methods, including Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Klarna, Affirm, iDEAL, Pix, UPI, Boleto and OXXO. Its prebuilt payment surfaces are named Checkout, Payment Links, Elements and the Payment Element. The rates that follow are taken from Stripe's UK pricing pages and are quoted in pounds, so they are UK figures rather than global ones. A standard UK-issued card costs 1.5% plus 20p per successful charge. A premium UK card costs 2.8% plus 20p, a card issued elsewhere in the European Economic Area 2.5% plus 20p, and a card issued outside it 3.15% plus 20p. Currency conversion adds 2%. A dispute costs 20.00 GBP and the fee is returned if the merchant wins, while Smart Disputes charges 30% of the disputed amount for each dispute won. Around the core payment, Stripe sells a set of separate products. Billing is 0.7% of billing volume on pay as you go pricing, or from 450.00 GBP a month on an annual plan. Invoicing is 0.4% per paid invoice. Tax calculates for more than 100 countries and every US state across more than 600 product tax categories, and files returns through TaxJar in the US and through Taxually, HOST and Marosa elsewhere. Radar, the fraud screening layer, has four tiers named Lite, Standard, Plus and Pro, with Lite carrying no extra charge for businesses on standard payments pricing and the paid tiers starting at 8 GBP a month. Connect is the part built for platforms and marketplaces that pay out to other people. Its onboarding flow covers more than 46 countries in 14 languages, payouts cost 0.25% plus 10p, and instant payouts cost 1% of the amount sent. Issuing creates cards, at 10p for a virtual card and 3.50 GBP for a standard physical one, with no per-transaction fee on the first 500,000 GBP of card transactions. Terminal covers payments taken in person, at 1.4% plus 10p on EEA cards and 2.9% plus 10p on non-EEA cards, with readers priced from 49 GBP for a BBPOS WisePad 3 to 229 GBP for a Stripe Reader S700 or S710, excluding VAT.
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