#1212th of 92 in SaaS and app startersFor finance and business, finance and accounting
polar
Billing and merchant-of-record platform with usage metering and subscriptions
- Stars
- 10.5k
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Last commit
- Nov 2026
- Last release
- Nov 2026
- Language
- Python
9,583 on 22 Apr 202610,471 on 11 Nov 2026
From GitHub's daily star counts.
Checked on GitHub.
Overview
Polar is a billing backend for software products, supporting usage-based billing, subscriptions, seats, credits, trials and discounts. It acts as merchant of record, handling receipts, customer accounts, dunning, sales tax and VAT. The stack is a Python FastAPI API with a Next.js dashboard, exposed through a public API, webhooks and JS and Python SDKs.
Who it is for: Developers and AI startups who want hosted usage-based billing and tax handling
Strengths
- Meters events such as tokens, API calls, agent runs and GPU seconds
- Merchant of record handles sales tax, VAT, receipts and dunning
- Public API, webhooks and official JavaScript and Python SDKs
- Apache-2.0 licensed; built on FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Dramatiq and Next.js
Weaknesses
- Hosted service charges 3.4% to 5% plus a fixed fee per transaction
- README has no self-hosting steps; DEVELOPMENT.md covers dev setup only
- No Docker or compose files detected in the repository
- Full platform codebase, not a small starter to fork and customize
What it needs
- Python
- Needs IPinfo, Sentry
What changed
From the release notes. No flag means the note does not say so, not that the upgrade is safe.
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