Polar vs Stripe

Pick Polar for early-stage indie SaaS. Pick Stripe when you have eng resources.

Polar is the indie-first Merchant of Record: it handles VAT/sales tax compliance, accepts the chargebacks, and exposes a clean API for digital products and SaaS subscriptions. Stripe is the most flexible payment infrastructure on the market, with the lowest base fees, but you're on the hook for tax compliance, fraud handling, and dispute defence. For solo founders selling globally before they've raised, Polar removes more weight per dollar of fee than any other tool in the stack. Once you're past roughly £50k MRR with engineering capacity to handle billing, Stripe's lower fees and broader feature set become the rational choice. The pattern in 2026 is clear: start on Polar, migrate to Stripe at scale, and budget the migration as a real project not a script.