I'm using Polar as the payment provider for #talktolocals, but, please, keep in mind that I haven't withdrawn any money from there, so my experience is somewhat limited.
I didn't have any issues with reliability on their end, but I don't have too many paying customers.
Some things to be aware of:
- limited SDKs support. As you can see from their docs (polar.sh/docs/integrate/sdk/t…), they have SDKs for only 4 programming languages: TypeScript, Python, Go, and PHP. For example, I'm building #retrek in Java, and that adds up a complexity with Polar.
- TypeScript SDK is not 100% mature. It works, and works well, even has a great better-auth integration (if that's relevant to you), but it's still on the 0.x.x version, and they introduce breaking changes sometimes. Last time I upgraded dependencies, I had to make a few changes to the Polar-related code, as they changes the API for one of the things (don't recall exactly now). Also, I have reported at least 1 bug to them already where the SDK API was lacking some functionality. To their credit, they fixed that in a matter of days.
- they are built on top of Stripe, so all the pros/cons/limits of Stripe apply here. My assumption based on their ToS: Polar might be stricter with refund ratios than Stripe, as they need to keep that under control so Stripe won't block them.
- I had to bump my Cloudflare subscription to Pro to be able to use Bot Fight Mode with Polar webhooks, as Cloudflare treated them as bots. I reported this to the Polar Discord server (discord.com/channels/10786115…) and they were supposed to register their IPs as legit in Cloudflare. They didn't send me any updates, so I'm not sure whether it's still relevant
- I found their docs a bit immature as well, as I had to google/ask AI/search on Discord/GitHub sometimes to understand how certain things work.
- once I had an issue as a customer with Polar when it was rejecting my card. They fixed that when I reported that to the owner of the service I tried to pay for.
- Discord or email is the way to ask for support. I had only good experience there, quick responses.
These are mostly gotchas to be aware of.
Other than that, all is good so far, and I, personally, plan to stick with them. I haven't found anybody with the MoR feature that looks more promising than Polar.
I'm using Polar as the payment provider for
#talktolocals, but, please, keep in mind that I haven't withdrawn any money from there, so my experience is somewhat limited.
I didn't have any issues with reliability on their end, but I don't have too many paying customers.
Some things to be aware of:
#retrek in Java, and that adds up a complexity with Polar.
- limited SDKs support. As you can see from their docs (polar.sh/docs/integrate/sdk/t…), they have SDKs for only 4 programming languages: TypeScript, Python, Go, and PHP. For example, I'm building
- TypeScript SDK is not 100% mature. It works, and works well, even has a great better-auth integration (if that's relevant to you), but it's still on the 0.x.x version, and they introduce breaking changes sometimes. Last time I upgraded dependencies, I had to make a few changes to the Polar-related code, as they changes the API for one of the things (don't recall exactly now). Also, I have reported at least 1 bug to them already where the SDK API was lacking some functionality. To their credit, they fixed that in a matter of days.
- they are built on top of Stripe, so all the pros/cons/limits of Stripe apply here. My assumption based on their ToS: Polar might be stricter with refund ratios than Stripe, as they need to keep that under control so Stripe won't block them.
- I had to bump my Cloudflare subscription to Pro to be able to use Bot Fight Mode with Polar webhooks, as Cloudflare treated them as bots. I reported this to the Polar Discord server (discord.com/channels/10786115…) and they were supposed to register their IPs as legit in Cloudflare. They didn't send me any updates, so I'm not sure whether it's still relevant
- I found their docs a bit immature as well, as I had to google/ask AI/search on Discord/GitHub sometimes to understand how certain things work.
- once I had an issue as a customer with Polar when it was rejecting my card. They fixed that when I reported that to the owner of the service I tried to pay for.
- Discord or email is the way to ask for support. I had only good experience there, quick responses.
These are mostly gotchas to be aware of.
Other than that, all is good so far, and I, personally, plan to stick with them. I haven't found anybody with the MoR feature that looks more promising than Polar.
Wow! thanks for the detailed response. That's what I was looking for :)