Lemon Squeezy vs Polar

Lemon Squeezy is an all-in-one platform for SaaS businesses selling digital downloads, subscriptions, and software licenses. It says it acts as merchant of record for digital sales taxes and compliance. Merchants can embed no-code checkout forms on an existing site or share checkout links; its no-code and API solutions support 20+ payment methods and global bank payouts. Subscription billing can run weekly, monthly, or yearly, with management for upgrades, downgrades, cancellations, and free trials. The platform can issue software license keys and provides signed, throttled download links. Lemon Squeezy says its fraud protections use machine learning and real-time analytics to identify suspicious transactions. Its REST API documentation states a limit of 300 calls per minute, and documented integrations include ConvertKit, Mailchimp, and Zapier. Ecommerce has no monthly charge and costs 5% + $0.50 per transaction when sales are generated, with sales tax collection and remittance included. Email marketing is free for up to 500 subscribers. Lemon Squeezy was founded in 2019.

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.