Checkout.com vs Polar
Checkout.com
checkout.comPolar
polar.shSide by side
| Figure | Checkout.com | Polar |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $20/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | Yes |
| Android | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 4 |
| Spec score · Frictionless Checkout Software | 8.9 (#1) | 8.4 (#6) |
| Founded | 2012 | 2024 |
| Headquarters | London, United Kingdom | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Support | Checkout.com offers merchant support for technical issues and strategic advice, and its Dashboard AI agent is available 24/7. | Polar lists standard support for Starter, prioritized support for Pro and Growth, and P1 support plus a shared Slack channel for Scale. |
| Who it serves | Checkout.com describes its payment services as built for businesses and says it delivers payments to the world’s biggest businesses. | Polar says it is building the finance layer for the next generation of AI products and describes its team as remote and distributed worldwide. |
Plans
Checkout.com
- Registered charitiesFree
- Registered-charity processingFree
- Custom tailored planPriced on request
- Tailored pricingPriced on request
In their own words
Checkout.com
Checkout.com provides businesses with services to accept customer payments and send funds, through multiple payment methods and integration routes. It supports more than 150 processing currencies and local acquiring in over 50 countries. Merchants can take major card schemes, direct debits, vouchers, digital wallets and bank transfers, with recurring and marketplace payments also listed. Integration options include Flow, ecommerce plugins, mobile SDKs for Android and iOS, hosted payment pages and an API; its partner directory names Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Intelligent Acceptance uses an AI engine to optimize payments. Fraud Detection includes network intelligence, machine-learning risk scores, transaction rules, and allow and block lists, with advanced controls and analytics in a Pro tier. Checkout.com says it is PCI DSS Level 1 compliant and its systems are ISO 27001 certified. Pricing is on request and tailored to business profile and risk category; registered charities can receive free processing where the service operates. The company lists Android, iOS, web and API support.
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.