Cartpanda vs Polar
Cartpanda
cartpanda.comPolar
polar.shSide by side
| Figure | Cartpanda | Polar |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $20/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 6 | 4 |
| Spec score · Frictionless Checkout Software | 8.7 (#3) | 8.4 (#6) |
| Headquarters | Plano, Texas, United States | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Support | The checkout page advertises real-time support, and the pricing page lists priority support on Starter, Premium, and Advanced, plus one-on-one support on Advanced. | Polar lists standard support for Starter, prioritized support for Pro and Growth, and P1 support plus a shared Slack channel for Scale. |
Plans
Cartpanda
- BasicPrice not published
- BasicsFree
- Light$0.99 a month
- Starter$29 a month
- Premium$99 a month
- Advanced$299 a month
In their own words
Polar
Polar is a billing stack for AI products, combining subscriptions, usage billing, credits, invoicing, and merchant-of-record services. It collects usage events into customer meters and adds metered charges to the next invoice. Meters can count, sum, average, find minimums or maximums, and track unique values. Usage collection options cover LLM activity, streaming responses, S3-compatible storage, elapsed time, and manually submitted events; LLM integrations include the Vercel AI SDK and compatible models that return usage data. As merchant of record, Polar says it resells products in over 100 markets and handles payments, sales tax, fraud, refunds, and chargebacks. Its hosted checkout supports localized currencies and includes sales tax. Automated benefits include usage credits, license keys, file downloads up to 10GB, and invitations to private GitHub repositories and Discord. Polar lists apps for iOS and Android and plugins for Raycast and Framer. The Starter plan is free; Pro is $20/month, Growth is $100/month, and Scale is $400/month, with transaction fees on each plan. Usage meters do not block activity when a quota is exceeded; the product using Polar must enforce limits.