polarsource/polar
Polar — A billing platform for the intelligence era observed · 2026-08-28
Health v2 · maintenance only
97/100
- Activity 99
- Release rhythm 98
- Longevity 93
How is this computed?
round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10) — computed 2026-09-03. Adoption (stars, forks) is never an input.
- gap_med: 5.0
- age_days: 1315
- days_rel: 14
- days_push: 7
- n_releases_24m: 33
Adoption not part of the score
10212 stars · 767 forks observed · 2026-08-28
What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded
Polar is an open-source billing and monetization platform that acts as merchant of record, offering usage-based billing, subscriptions, seats, credits, trials, discounts, hosted checkout, and global tax compliance. It is built for AI startups that need to meter and charge for tokens, agent runs, and compute without building billing infrastructure from scratch.
Use cases
- bill customers per token or API call for an AI product
- sell subscriptions and digital products with global tax handled
- implement usage-based billing with meters and events
- add seat-based team pricing with automatic proration
- sell prepaid credit packs that draw down per event
- offer free trials with automatic card capture and conversion
- track per-customer cost and gross margin for LLM APIs
- avoid building VAT/GST/sales tax compliance for international sales
When to choose
- you want a Stripe alternative that also handles tax compliance as merchant of record
- you need to meter tokens, agent runs, or GPU seconds and bill them precisely
- you want subscriptions, dunning, proration, and customer portals out of the box
- you are an AI startup that wants to monetize usage without building billing infrastructure
When to avoid
- you only need raw payment processing without billing, tax, or product management
- you cannot accept a per-transaction fee model (5% + 50¢ on the free tier)
- you need full control over the payment flow and customer data residency
- your product is not software or digital (physical goods are out of scope)
Facets
service · maturity active
api-framework webhook analytics self-hosted sdk fintech e-commerce developer-tools apis large-language-models self-hosted cloud python merchant-of-record usage-billing subscriptions metering checkout tax-compliance credits seat-based-pricing monetization ai-startups billing payments saas web-server nodejs docker
10 sources
- readme: https://github.com/polarsource/polar · fetched 2026-08-28 · 99845600bc1f
- homepage: https://polar.sh · fetched 2026-08-29 · 2c628d833493
- site_page: https://polar.sh/docs · fetched 2026-08-29 · 4bef5ed202a2
- site_page: https://polar.sh/features/usage-billing · fetched 2026-08-29 · aad1510940bf
- site_page: https://polar.sh/features/subscriptions · fetched 2026-08-29 · 2dd555a970b9
- site_page: https://polar.sh/features/seats · fetched 2026-08-29 · 2026b0219a12
- site_page: https://polar.sh/features/credits · fetched 2026-08-29 · f864bd14b307
- site_page: https://polar.sh/features/trials · fetched 2026-08-29 · 7c2a72ea788a
- site_page: https://polar.sh/features/discounts · fetched 2026-08-29 · efb4b5b50c59
- site_page: https://polar.sh/features/cost-insights · fetched 2026-08-29 · 761e814eca5a
Member repositories
| Repository | Role | Health v2 |
|---|---|---|
| polarsource/polar | main | 97 |
For agents
markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="polarsource/polar")
Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00 · Report a problem