Freemius vs Polar

Freemius is a merchant-of-record platform that handles software payments, subscriptions, taxes, licensing, fraud, and disputes. Its hosted or embedded checkout supports subscriptions, trials, licensing, cart recovery, and multiple currencies. Sellers can set trials of 7, 14, or 30 days, choose what features remain after expiry, and apply licensing rules that enable or disable features according to a customer’s plan. Customers can use a self-service portal to manage subscriptions, billing details, downloads, invoices, and licenses. Supported products include SaaS, desktop apps, Chrome extensions, Electron apps, and WordPress products. Named integrations include Zapier, Segment, Customer.io, HubSpot, and Mailchimp. Freemius says it calculates, collects, reports, and remits sales tax and VAT, and follows PCI DSS 4.0; it also says card details do not reach or remain on its servers. The company traces the platform to a micro-SaaS launched by its founder in 2010. Transaction pricing is 3.8% + 50¢ per transaction plus gateway fees; no setup or monthly fees are listed.

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.