Polar vs Lemon Squeezy

Polar

B-

Polar (polar.sh) is an open-source merchant of record and billing platform for developers selling software, SaaS subscriptions and digital products. It is run by Polar Software, Inc., a Delaware corporation whose team is based in Stockholm, and was founded in 2022 by Birk Jernström, who co-founded the e-commerce platform Tictail, sold it to Shopify in 2018 and then led product for Shopify's Shop app. Polar launched version 1.0 of its billing platform in September 2024 and raised a $10 million seed round led by Accel in June 2025, with angels from Shopify, Vercel, Supabase, Raycast, Resend and Framer. As merchant of record it is the legal seller of everything sold through it — it collects and remits US sales tax, EU VAT, Canadian GST and other taxes, carries chargeback liability and issues the invoices — and it charges a single platform fee on top of that. That fee changed on 27 May 2026. Organisations created before that date keep an 'Early Member' rate of 4% + 40¢ plus 0.5% on subscriptions indefinitely; new organisations pay 5% + 50¢ on the free Starter plan or buy down the rate with Pro ($20 a month, 3.8% + 40¢), Growth ($100, 3.6% + 35¢) or Scale ($400, 3.4% + 30¢). International (non-US) cards add 1.5%, disputes cost $15 each regardless of outcome, payouts go through Stripe Connect at Stripe's pass-through fees ($2 per active payout month, 0.25% + 25¢ per payout), and organisations created on or after 12 May 2026 have a seven-day settlement delay before they can withdraw. Its code is Apache 2.0 on GitHub, its SDKs and framework adapters are widely praised, and its weak points are the ones you would expect of a seed-stage company two years into operating: thin support, fixed dunning you cannot customise, and pricing for newcomers that is now level with Paddle and Lemon Squeezy rather than below them.

Lemon Squeezy

C+

Lemon Squeezy is a merchant-of-record platform for selling software, digital downloads, subscriptions and licence keys, launched publicly in 2021 by a small team of founders led by JR Farr and acquired by Stripe in July 2024. As merchant of record it is the legal seller of record on every transaction: it collects and remits sales tax and VAT worldwide, absorbs fraud and chargeback liability, and pays the merchant a net amount twice a month. The price is one number — 5% plus 50 cents per transaction, with no monthly fee — plus surcharges of 1.5% on international and PayPal transactions and 0.5% on subscription payments, and the tooling around it (checkout overlays, licence keys, signed download links, affiliates, email marketing) is unusually complete for the price. The catch is what has happened since the acquisition. Stripe has built its own merchant-of-record product, Stripe Managed Payments, priced at 3.5% on top of standard Stripe fees, and in January 2026 Lemon Squeezy's chief executive wrote that the team had been heads-down on it, that Lemon Squeezy users had seen slower support and fewer updates as a result, and that the goal was to give them an easy way to migrate. Independent sentiment has collapsed accordingly: 1.2 on Trustpilot from 173 reviews, 88% of them one-star, mostly about onboarding rejections and unanswered support requests. The product still works and still signs up new merchants, but a buyer today is choosing a platform whose own maker is steering customers to its successor.