Polar
The billing stack for the intelligence era
Polar is a billing platform for developers and AI-era software that acts as merchant of record, handling payments, subscriptions, usage-based billing, invoicing, and global sales tax collection and remittance across 100+ markets. It solves the problem of billing products consumed by tokens, agent runs, and compute rather than fixed seats, turning event streams into revenue while taking on payment processing, fraud, refunds, chargebacks, and tax compliance.
Core capabilities include usage billing built on events, meters, and metered prices, with aggregation functions such as count, sum, min, max, average, and unique. Ingestion strategies cover LLM token counting (compatible with OpenAI-style models and the Vercel AI SDK), streaming responses, S3-compatible storage, delta-time measurement, and manual event posting. Other modules include subscriptions with trials and proration, prepaid credits, hosted checkout, invoicing, payouts, and cost insights that place inference costs alongside revenue to show margins per customer.
Polar is aimed at developers, startups, and AI product teams. It is packaged with a free Starter plan, paid tiers (Pro, Growth, Scale) with seat-based monthly fees plus per-transaction rates, and a Startup Program offering the Scale plan free for twelve months for early-stage AI startups.
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