Polar vs Tebex

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.

Tebex provides storefronts and payment processing for digital goods sold by game servers and studios. Its in-game stores and webstores can offer items, subscriptions, season passes, and DLCs, with options to customize the storefront. Developers can connect through Webstore Builder, Headless API, or Checkout API; the latter requires prior compliance approval and is not available to some user-generated-content creators, including FiveM and RedM creators. Tebex lists more than 130 local and global payment methods and says it acts as Merchant of Record, handling sales-tax calculation, collection, and remittance. Fraud detection and chargeback handling are included, and Tebex says it manages disputes. Official server plugins cover Minecraft, Hytale, Rust, ARK, and FiveM, which also has a built-in integration. The free Starter plan has a 5% platform fee for most games and 15% for FiveM. Plus costs £12.49/mo. New stores receive a free 90-day Plus trial without providing payment details.