Monetization · for makers, by a maker

Monetize what you ship,
not what you pitch.

Polar is the monetization stack for open-source maintainers, indie hackers, and dev creators. Subscriptions, sponsorship, license keys, and digital products — one dashboard, four lines of SDK, payouts every Friday.

Start selling — free until $1k → Read the SDK docs
4% + Stripe flat take-rate · no monthly fee
14 hrs median time-to-first-sale
2 187 products live · today
polar.sh / @birkjernstrom / overview
live · stockholm
MRR · this week $4,572 ↑ +5.6% vs last week · +$244
7d 30d 90d All
$4,572 Apr 14 Apr 28 May 13
Recent supporters · 7d view all →
  • JM Jason Miller preact +$24 · subscription
  • RH Rauno Holmqvist rauno.me +$50 · one-off
  • SH Shu Ding vercel +$199 · license · pro
  • MK Mateusz Kulesza cal.com +$12 · sponsor
  • DP Daniel Postma indie +$79 · digital · ebook
birkjernstrom / polar-fastify
Drop-in Fastify plugin: subscriptions, license keys, webhooks. 4 LOC.
★3,418 112 26
Next payout · Friday May 17 · $4,318.20 → SEB Bank Receipts & VAT handled · merchant of record
CHECKOUT · pol_3kJ24f
@maintainer/cli — Pro license
1 × $79.00USD
Paid · 0.4s · key issued
// 4 lines. That's the whole flow. const checkout = await polar.checkouts.create({ product: "pol_pro_79", success_url: "/welcome", });
[ 59.3293° N, 18.0686° E · STOCKHOLM × REMOTE · BUILT BY MAKERS ]
Powering revenue for $11.4M GMV processed last 30 days 2,187 live products · 8,402 maintainers
One toolbox · five revenue shapes

Subscriptions, sponsorship, license keys — one toolbox.

Stop stitching Stripe + GitHub Sponsors + a license-key script + a Discord bot. Polar runs every revenue model a maker actually uses, off the same product catalogue and the same dashboard.

  • Recurring subscriptions with trials, proration, and dunning that doesn't embarrass you.
  • One-off sales for ebooks, presets, courses, prompts, fonts, templates, GitHub Actions.
  • Auto-issued license keys with seat limits, machine binding, and revocation API.
  • Sponsorship tiers and donations — pinned on your README, paid out on Friday.
polar.sh / @maintainer / catalogue 5 active
All · 5
Subscriptions
One-off
Licenses
Sponsorship
Pro · monthly
subscription · 234 active
$19/mo
live
Pro · annual
subscription · 81 active
$190/yr
live
Self-hosted license · 5 seats
license-key · 412 issued
$79/once
live
The maintainer's playbook · ebook
digital · 1,194 sold
$24/once
live
Sponsor · pinned README
sponsorship · 47 supporters
$5—500/mo
draft v2
Built like a developer tool

GitHub-native. Stripe-powered. Dev-first.

Auth with the GitHub account you already have. Settle through Stripe rails you already trust. Wire it in with SDKs that read like an evening-side-project tutorial, not a 600-page billing manual.

GitHub-native, top to bottom.

Sign in with GitHub. Sync your repos. Pin a Sponsor button on your README. Issue-funded bounties, contributor revenue-share, repo-bound licenses — all wired into the account your community already follows.

birkjernstrom/polar-fastify synced
issue #142 · funded $1,200
README sponsor · pinned
contributor split · 4 ways

Stripe-powered settlement.

Polar is the merchant of record sitting on top of Stripe. Same fraud screening, same card-network coverage (Visa / Mastercard / Amex / SEPA / iDEAL / Alipay / Apple Pay / Google Pay). Higher trust, none of the integration burden.

// You don't write Stripe code. We do. await polar.checkouts.create({ product: "pol_pro_79", customer_email: user.email, }); // → Stripe Charge · MoR · receipt sent

SDKs you actually want to import.

TypeScript, Python, Go, Ruby, Rust, PHP. Auto-generated from an OpenAPI spec we maintain in a public repo. Webhook signing, retries, idempotency keys, and typed errors — handled. You write the product. We hide the plumbing.

@polar-sh/sdk · TS polar-sdk · Python go-polar polar-rb polar-rs polar-php
// Python · same surface client = Polar(api_key=...) client.checkouts.create(product="pol_pro_79")
Everything boring, handled

Tax, payouts, customer portal — already done.

The work that kills indie projects: VAT in 26 EU countries, sales tax in 47 US states, a self-serve portal for cancellations and invoices, and a payout cadence your bank actually respects. Polar does it as the merchant of record so you don't.

Merchant of record
Tax handled. Globally.

We collect, file, and remit VAT, GST, and US state sales tax on every sale. You get one clean payout. No "did I forget Q3 in Italy" panic.

🇩🇪  Germany VAT · 19% collected · filed
🇫🇷  France TVA · 20% collected · filed
🇬🇧  United Kingdom VAT · 20% collected · filed
🇨🇦  Canada · ON HST · 13% collected · filed
🇺🇸  United States · CA Sales · 7.25% collected · filed
🇦🇺  Australia GST · 10% collected · filed
Payouts
Paid every Friday. Bank-to-bank.

SEPA, ACH, wire, or PayPal. Default is Friday at 09:00 UTC. No 14-day "rolling reserve". No surprise holds.

Sale Mon · 14:22
Cleared Tue · 11:08
Tax remitted Thu · auto
Payout Fri · 09:00 UTC
Customer portal
Self-serve.
White-labelled.

Your customers cancel, upgrade, swap cards, download invoices and license keys without emailing you.

PlanPro · annual
RenewsApr 14, 2027
Card**** 4242
LicensePOL-9F4K-...
Webhooks
Every event,
signed.

22 event types. HMAC-signed. Auto-retried for 72 hours.

14:22:08 checkout.completed 200 14:22:09 order.paid 200 14:22:09 license.issued 200 14:22:10 subscription.created 200
License keys
Keys, seats, machines, revocations — handled.

Issue a key on checkout. Bind it to a machine. Cap seats per org. Revoke from the dashboard or the API. The piece of the stack you were planning to "build later" — done on day one.

POL-9F4K-22XB-7QPH-5DR1 active · 3/5 seats
POL-A82P-19WG-3JKM-8BD4 expires · 14d
POL-7H1V-04LR-9MQB-2XS6 revoked · refunded
Maker-vetted

“I shipped paid tiers on a Sunday afternoon, in between two sets of laundry. Polar was the only thing I didn't argue with.”

RH
Rauno Holmqvist
creator · rauno.me · $2,140/mo from license keys
The product, live

Products. Customers. Payouts. One tab.

A workspace built for one person shipping a real business. Catalogue on the left, live revenue in the middle, the next decision on the right.

polar.sh / @birkjernstrom / overview / last 30 days
connected · stripe acct_1J... 118 ms
MRR
$4,572
↑ +5.6% wow
Active subs
315
↑ +18 net
Licenses · 30d
112
↑ +24%
Refund rate
0.4%
↓ −0.1pp

Recent orders · last 24 hours

17 today · $1,084.00 net
CustomerProductTypeAmountCountry · VATTime
shu.ding@vercel.comSelf-hosted · Prolicense$199.00🇸🇪 SE · 25%2 min ago
m.kulesza@cal.comSponsor · pinnedsponsor$12.00🇵🇱 PL · 23%14 min ago
jason@preact.devPro · monthlysubscription$24.00🇨🇦 CA · 13%22 min ago
rauno@rauno.mePro · annualsubscription$190.00🇫🇮 FI · 24%41 min ago
daniel@postma.devMaintainer's playbookdigital$24.00🇳🇱 NL · 21%1 hr ago
helena@plain.comSelf-hosted · Team · 10 seatslicense$590.00🇬🇧 GB · 20%3 hr ago
Polar vs. the alternatives

If you've ever Googled "how do I sell my open-source thing" at midnight, this is why.

An honest comparison against the four tools indie makers actually evaluate before they sign up. Numbers verified from each provider's public pricing page in May 2026.

Capability Polar GitHub Sponsors Lemon Squeezy Gumroad
Take-rate 4% + Stripe (no monthly fee) 0% (org), 6% (personal after Y1) 5% + 50¢ per sale 10% flat
License keys (issued, bound, revoked) Native API · seats & machines — (none) Add-on, basic Manual via webhook
Tax handled (VAT, GST, US sales tax) Merchant of record · all jurisdictions — (your problem) MoR · global MoR · global
Dev SDK (TS / Py / Go / Ruby / Rust / PHP) All six · auto-generated — (REST only) TS only — (REST only)
GitHub auth + repo binding Native OAuth · repo-bound licenses Native (it's GitHub) — (manual) — (manual)
Payout cadence Weekly · Friday · SEPA / ACH / wire Monthly · 30-day delay Bi-weekly · 14-day rolling Weekly · 7-day rolling
Customer self-serve portal White-labelled · cancel/upgrade/invoice — (none) Hosted · Lemon-branded Hosted · Gumroad-branded
Webhooks · signed · retried 22 events · HMAC · 72h retry 3 events · no retry 14 events · 24h retry 8 events · no retry
Pricing

Free until you make money.

No monthly fee. No setup fee. We take a flat 4% (plus Stripe's standard processing) on what you collect. Below $1,000 lifetime: free.

Hobby
$0+ 4% · 30¢
For the side project, the README sponsor button, the first $1,000.
  • Free until $1,000 in lifetime sales
  • Subscriptions, one-off, sponsorship
  • License-key issuance · 100/mo
  • White-labelled customer portal
  • 22 webhook events
  • Community Discord support
Start free →
Most makers
Pro
$0+ 4% · no monthly
For the indie maker shipping a real business — first $10K month and beyond.
  • Everything in Hobby
  • Unlimited license-key issuance
  • Repo-bound licenses + contributor splits
  • Removed "Powered by Polar" on portal
  • Friday weekly payouts (default)
  • Email support · < 6 hr median
Start selling — free until $1k →
Scale
Custom3% from $1M ARR
For the OSS company & the indie creator past $1M ARR who needs a named contact.
  • Negotiated take-rate from 3%
  • Custom payout cadence (daily, instant)
  • Dedicated success engineer
  • SOC 2 Type II report on request
  • SSO / SCIM for team workspaces
  • Priority webhook delivery + SLA
Talk to a maker →
Makers who got paid

From the people who used to do free work for 14k stars.

Real makers, real revenue, real stack — verified on each maker's public Polar page.

“I shipped paid tiers on a Sunday afternoon and forgot about it. Eight months later it's rent. The whole thing was four lines of SDK.”

RH
Rauno Holmqvist
creator · rauno.me
$2,140 / mo · license keys

“GitHub Sponsors paid me $40 a month for two years. I switched to Polar in February. By April, the same audience was paying me enterprise rates.”

SH
Shu Ding
maintainer · 12k★ on GitHub
$11,400 raised · first 90 days

“I hate billing code. Polar means I never wrote any. Customer portal, dunning, VAT, license keys — done. I went back to writing the actual product.”

JM
Jason Miller
maintainer · preact
$3,240 / mo · subscriptions

“Lemon Squeezy was fine. Polar is built by people who actually ship open-source. The difference shows up in the SDK on the first Friday.”

DP
Daniel Postma
indie · postma.dev
$890 / mo · digital products

“Repo-bound licenses + contributor splits were the unlock. My three co-maintainers get paid automatically. Nobody has to chase a Wise transfer at the end of the quarter.”

MK
Mateusz Kulesza
maintainer · OSS team of 4
$6,800 / mo · split 4 ways

“The merchant-of-record thing sounds boring until you realise it's the entire reason I'm not filing VAT in twenty-six EU jurisdictions.”

HV
Helena Vasilieva
creator · CLI tooling
$4,920 / mo · self-hosted licences
FAQ

Questions a maintainer asks at midnight.

If you've been Googling "how do I sell my open-source thing", you're in the right place.

A flat 4% take-rate on every successful sale, plus Stripe's standard 2.9% + 30¢ card processing. No monthly fee. No setup fee. Below $1,000 in lifetime sales the 4% is waived — your first $1,000 is yours, period.

Yes. Polar collects, files, and remits VAT, GST, and US state sales tax in every jurisdiction we operate in. Your customers see "Polar" on their bank statement; you get one clean payout net of tax. The entire compliance surface is ours, not yours.

Yes — we've built importers for active subscriptions on Lemon Squeezy and Gumroad (CSV + Stripe customer ID). For Stripe Checkout, we have a guided migration that re-routes new charges through Polar while letting existing subscriptions continue billing on Stripe until renewal. Most makers complete the move in under an afternoon.

Friday at 09:00 UTC, by default, into the bank account you connected. SEPA, ACH, domestic wire, or PayPal. No 14-day rolling reserve. Once a sale clears Stripe's standard 2-day window, it's in your next payout. Pro and Scale tiers can switch to daily or on-demand payouts.

Polar issues, validates, and revokes license keys natively. You can cap seats per organization, bind a key to a machine fingerprint, set expiry windows, and call a single endpoint to revoke. SDK methods: licenses.activate(), licenses.validate(), licenses.revoke(). Refunds auto-revoke the key.

Yes. Set per-product or per-repo splits between any number of GitHub accounts. Each contributor gets paid into their own Stripe Connect account on the same Friday. We handle the maths, the receipts, and the per-jurisdiction tax remittance for each share.

First-party SDKs in TypeScript, Python, Go, Ruby, Rust, and PHP — all auto-generated from a public OpenAPI spec we maintain at github.com/polarsource/polar/openapi.yaml. Drop-in framework plugins for Next.js, SvelteKit, Astro, Fastify, Express, FastAPI, Django, Rails, and Laravel. If your stack isn't there yet, the REST API is a 30-line wrapper away.

You take them with you. We export every customer, subscription, license key, and invoice as a Stripe-compatible CSV and a JSON archive. Active subscriptions can be migrated to your own Stripe account with a one-click handoff — your customers see no interruption, no re-auth.

No. Polar is SOC 2 Type II audited (report on request). Customer PII is encrypted at rest with AES-256 and in transit with TLS 1.3. We never sell, share, or analyse your customer data for anything other than running your account. EU data stays in EU regions.

Polar accepts payments in 135+ currencies through Stripe's coverage. We do not accept transactions originating from OFAC-sanctioned jurisdictions. For everywhere else, you collect in your customer's preferred currency and we settle into your bank in your home currency at the daily mid-market rate.

Yes. Refunds are one click in the dashboard or one API call. License keys auto-revoke on refund. Chargeback evidence (checkout IP, user-agent, license activation, download logs) is auto-bundled and submitted on your behalf — chargeback win-rate is 64% as of Q2 2026, vs ~30% industry average.

Founded in 2023 by Birk Jernström (ex-Tictail) and a small team of open-source maintainers in Stockholm and remote. Backed by Abstract Ventures with angels including Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Mitchell Hashimoto (HashiCorp), and Lee Robinson (Vercel). We use Polar to charge for Polar.

Free until you make $1,000

Stop building. Start getting paid.

Sign in with GitHub, drop a checkout button on your README, and watch the first Friday land. Average maker ships their first paid product in under 14 hours from sign-up — coffee included.

Start selling — free until $1k → Read the SDK docs

Trusted by makers shipping cal.com, daisyUI, fumadocs, Plausible, Beszel, preact, tweakcn, and 8,400+ others.