Stripe vs Polar Fees, Processor or Open-Source MoR
Stripe's 2.9% + 30¢ beats Polar's 5% + 50¢ on raw rate, but the full SaaS stack tells another story. Compare loaded costs, tax handling, and payout fees.
Stripe breakdown
- Base fee (2.9% + 30¢) $3.20
Polar.sh breakdown
- Base fee (5% + 50¢) $5.50
The ranking counts per-transaction cost only. Monthly plan fees, payout fees, and dispute fees are listed separately on each platform page. Rates are verified against official pricing pages, and the sources list the dates.
Every Stripe vs Polar.sh fee side by side
| Stripe | Polar.sh | |
|---|---|---|
| Base transaction fee | 2.9% + 30¢ | Starter (free) 5% + 50¢ Pro ($20/mo) 3.8% + 40¢ Growth ($100/mo) 3.6% + 35¢ Scale ($400/mo) 3.4% + 30¢ |
| International cards | +1.5% | +1.5% |
| Currency conversion | +1% | No surcharge |
| Subscription billing | +0.7% | Included |
| PayPal | Not offered | Not offered |
| Monthly fee | None | Varies by plan ($0–$400/mo) |
| Payout fees | Free standard payouts to US bank accounts (Instant payouts cost 1.5% (min 50¢)) | $2/month with payouts + 0.25% + 25¢ per payout (0.25–1% FX on non-USD payouts) |
| Dispute / chargeback fee | $15.00 | $15.00 |
| Sales tax / VAT handling | You register, file, and remit sales tax/VAT (Stripe Tax adds 0.5%) | MoR Polar handles global sales tax and VAT as the legal seller |
| Source | Official pricing, last verified 2026-07-10 (US rates. stripe.com geo-serves pricing by visitor location) | Official pricing, last verified 2026-07-10 (Plans introduced May 2026. Grandfathered Early Member orgs pay 4% + 40¢ + 0.5% on subscriptions) |
| Platform | $10 sale | $50 sale | $500 sale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stripe | $0.59 | $1.75 | $14.80 |
| Polar.sh | $1.00 | $3.00 | $25.50 |
Two developer tools, two legal positions
Stripe’s 2.9% + 30¢ buys card processing with you as the merchant. Subscription billing costs another 0.7%, Stripe Tax 0.5%, international cards 1.5%, and currency conversion 1%, and even fully stacked, registering for tax IDs and filing returns remains your work. Polar inverts the arrangement. As merchant of record it is the legal seller, so registration, filing, and remittance happen on Polar’s side, priced at 5% + 50¢ on the free Starter plan, 3.8% + 40¢ on Pro ($20/month), 3.6% + 35¢ on Growth ($100/month), and 3.4% + 30¢ on Scale ($400/month), each with a 1.5% international-card surcharge.
Where the spread is $2.30, and where it is 16 cents
A $100 domestic one-time sale is Stripe’s best case, $3.20 against Polar Starter’s $5.50, with Pro trimming the gap to $4.20. Flip to a $49 international subscription and Stripe’s add-ons activate. The 2.9% base plus 0.7% Billing, 1.5% international, and 1% FX makes 6.1% + 30¢, or $3.29, rising to $3.53 once Stripe Tax joins. Polar Starter charges $3.69. Sixteen cents now separates a stack that leaves the filings on your desk from one that files them. Pro undercuts the loaded stack outright at $3.00, and in fact beats Stripe-with-Billing-and-Tax on any domestic charge above about $33, where 3.8% + 40¢ crosses under 4.1% + 30¢.
Two hundred subscribers at $29, half of them abroad
| Domestic charge | International charge | Blended | Monthly, 200 subs | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stripe (Billing + Tax) | $1.49 | $2.21 | $1.85 | $370 |
| Polar Starter | $1.95 | $2.39 | $2.17 | $434 |
| Polar Pro | $1.50 | $1.94 | $1.72 | $344 + $20 plan |
Fold in payouts (Stripe deposits to US banks free, Polar takes about $16 on this $5,800 of volume) and Pro finishes near $380 against Stripe’s $370. Ten dollars a month is the entire fee difference. The labor difference is that Stripe’s figure still assumes someone on your side registers in each jurisdiction and files on schedule, while Polar’s includes it. Dropping Stripe Tax saves $29 a month but leaves you computing tax some other way.
The items that never show up in a rate
Both platforms charge $15 per dispute, but the dispute lands differently. On Stripe the chargeback is formally against you. On Polar it is against the merchant of record. Polar’s remaining costs are its plan subscriptions and payout fees. Stripe’s remaining costs are whatever your tax position requires, anything from nothing (a US-only B2B tool under state nexus thresholds) to registrations across a dozen countries for a consumer product with global reach. That variable, not the posted rates, usually settles this comparison.
Open code against a bigger catalog
Both expose APIs and SDKs aimed at the same developer. Polar’s distinguishing property is that its platform code is open source and publicly auditable. Stripe’s is surface area, a far larger ecosystem of payment methods, tooling, and integrations. Neither charges for API access itself, so the fee comparison above is unaffected by which abstraction you prefer to build on.
Verdict
Raw Stripe is the cheaper tool whenever you can carry the compliance. A domestic-heavy business with a tax footprint limited to a few US states keeps 2.3 points more of every $100 sale than Polar Starter allows, and Stripe’s US payouts are free while Polar’s cost $2 a month plus 0.25% and 25¢. Choose Polar when international consumer sales make you liable for VAT in places you’ll never visit. Its all-in rate already includes what Stripe charges extra for, and on Pro a $49 international renewal costs $3.00 against Stripe’s fully loaded $3.53 with the filings still unfiled. The genuinely close case is a mid-sized SaaS with mixed geography, where fees land within a few dollars per hundred subscribers either way, so the decision reduces to whether the hours you’d spend on tax operations are worth more than Polar’s margin.What’s the best alternative?
Stripe and Polar.sh aren’t the only two options for this kind of selling. Kelviq, a newer merchant of record, charges 3.5% + 40¢ per sale with no monthly fee (2.9% + 40¢ on your first $5,000). On a $100 domestic sale that works out to $3.90, next to $3.20 on Stripe and $5.50 on Polar.sh, and the fee includes usage metering and entitlements that SaaS and AI products otherwise build separately. Run your own numbers in the Kelviq fee calculator, or see the direct matchups in Kelviq vs Stripe and Kelviq vs Polar.sh.