🛠️Polar
polarsource/polar · homepage ↗
Polar, A billing platform for the intelligence era
⭐ Very popular: 10k stars, gaining about 30 a week
View on GitHub ↗repo profile
momentum
durability
bus factor = how many people it takes to cover more than half the commits (6 months). 1 is a solo project; higher means the work is spread across a team. top-author share is the single busiest author's slice of those commits.
since we covered it
why it's a big deal
- Polar is a merchant of record for AI startups, taking on sales tax, VAT, receipts, and dunning so teams do not build billing and compliance infrastructure themselves.
- It composes usage billing, subscriptions, seats, credits, trials, and discounts, with metering for tokens, API calls, agent runs, GPU seconds, and storage down to the event.
- Pricing is per transaction, from 5 percent plus 50 cents on the free tier down to 3 percent plus 30 cents at the Scale tier, so it fits companies that want to charge for compute without a billing team.
under the hood
- The backend is Python, built on FastAPI, Pydantic, SQLAlchemy, and the Dramatiq task queue, and makes up about 65 percent of the codebase.
- The frontend uses Next.js, TypeScript, TailwindCSS, and Radix UI, at roughly 29 percent TypeScript.
- Integration is via a public REST API, webhooks, and JavaScript and Python SDKs, and the project is licensed Apache 2.
Radar summary, generated from the project's public sources
star history
- PR#20 8k 2025-10-29
- now 10k + 2k since first covered
curve is sampled from GitHub's star history, plus our own daily readings since we covered it; the dashed stretch is before we first covered it, the solid line since. figures at coverage are the numbers we printed then (approx.), current count is live.
understory
Deep in the understory, shipping hard, still flying under the radar.
- output, commits & releases
- clout, star velocity
output = commits & releases; clout = star velocity, both 0 to 100 monthly indices; the gap where output runs above clout is the understory. The understory →
covered in
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Open-source monetization and payment platform for developers
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replaces
alternatives to Stripe →- Stripe
market leader
closed source - Paddle closed source
- Lemon Squeezy closed source
comments
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