Payment stack · data study
Polar vs Stripe
Of 840 products that publish their revenue, 64 use Polar and 497 use Stripe. Below is what that split actually looks like — company size, geography, and the rest of the stack — instead of another fee table.
Polar share
7.6%
64 of 840
Stripe share
59.2%
497 of 840
Median MRR (whole sample)
$147
self-reported
The short answer
Pick Polar if you don't want to be the merchant of record
Polar sells on your behalf, so sales tax, VAT and refunds are its problem, not yours. That single difference explains most of the teams in this sample choosing it.
Stay on Stripe if you already have an entity and volume
Stripe is used by 59.2% of the sample and its users report a median MRR of $236 — about $206 higher than Polar users. The heavier the volume, the less a percentage-based MoR fee makes sense.
The real cost difference is not the headline rate
It is who files the tax, who handles chargebacks, and whether you need a local entity. Compare those three before comparing percentages — and check current pricing on each provider’s own page, since rates change.
Who actually uses what
Out of 422 products with public revenue in the sample. Only products that list a provider in their tech stack are counted, so these are floors, not market share.
| Provider | Type | Teams | Share | Median MRR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stripe | Payment service provider (you are the merchant of record) | 497 | 59.2% | $236 |
| Dodo Payments | Merchant of record | 93 | 11.1% | $97 |
| Polar | Merchant of record | 64 | 7.6% | $30 |
| Lemon Squeezy | Merchant of record | 29 | 3.5% | $66 |
| Paddle | Merchant of record | 18 | 2.1% | $50 |
| Creem | Merchant of record | 8 | 1% | $19 |
What Polar teams look like
Most common countries
Rest of their stack
Largest public examples
- AI Toolbox$22,722 last 30 days · MRR $1,314
- AgenKit$3,080 last 30 days · MRR $473
- AgentsGuild$398 last 30 days
- AnyRouter$162 last 30 days · MRR $144
- ApptheticsIndia · $137 last 30 days · MRR $121
Frequently asked
Is Polar cheaper than Stripe?
It depends on your volume, not on the headline percentage. Polar takes a cut as merchant of record but absorbs tax filing and compliance; Stripe charges less per transaction but leaves tax registration to you. Model your own monthly revenue against both, and read the current rates on Polar's and Stripe's own pricing pages, because both change.
What is the actual difference between Polar and Stripe?
One is a seller, the other is a pipe. Polar is a merchant of record: it is legally the seller, so it handles sales tax, VAT, invoices and refunds. Stripe is a payment service provider: you are the seller and the tax entity. Everything else — fees, dashboard, API shape — follows from that single difference.
How many startups actually use Polar?
64 of 840 products in this sample list it in their declared tech stack (7.6%), versus 497 for Stripe (59.2%). That is a gap of 51.6 percentage points, so Polar is a real minority choice rather than a drop-in replacement at scale.
Can I migrate an existing Stripe subscription business to Polar?
Technically yes, but the work sits in the boring parts: re-authorising cards or running dunning on existing subscribers, keeping invoice history for tax, re-pointing webhooks to your own backend, and telling customers why the descriptor on their statement changed. Budget for churn during migration, not just engineering hours.
Method & source
Sample: 840 products that publish revenue data, collected 2026-10-29. Usage = the provider appears in the product's declared tech stack. Median MRR is computed only over products with a non-zero reported MRR. Nothing here is an estimate of fees; pricing lives on each provider's own site.
Aggregated from public revenue disclosures; see the library for each company's own page.
Other comparisons
Last updated 2026-10-30 · Makemoneylens