// the find
polarsource/polar
Turn your software into a business.
Polar is a payments and monetization platform for indie developers and small software businesses — sell subscriptions, license keys, file downloads, and GitHub repo access without setting up your own billing stack. It acts as merchant of record, meaning Polar handles tax collection (VAT, sales tax) so you don't have to register in every jurisdiction. Self-hostable, open source Apache 2.0, with a hosted version at polar.sh.
The merchant-of-record model is the real value here — tax compliance across jurisdictions is genuinely painful to DIY, and Polar absorbs that entirely. The stack is well-chosen: FastAPI + SQLAlchemy on the backend, Next.js on the frontend, Dramatiq for async jobs — nothing exotic, all maintainable. The monorepo includes a React Native mobile app, web dashboard, and server under Turborepo, and the CI/CD setup (separate workflows per layer, e2e tests, openapi diff checks) looks production-grade. They also ship SDKs for JS and Python with proper versioning via changesets.
The 5% + 50¢ fee on the free tier is steep for low-ticket digital products — sell a $5 item and Polar takes 15% before Stripe's cut. Self-hosting is technically possible but the setup involves Terraform, multiple services, and what appears to be non-trivial infra; the DEVELOPMENT.md suggests you'll need a local environment script just to run it, which means it's not a weekend project to operate yourself. The mobile app is Expo/React Native and looks feature-complete for buyers, but it's unclear how stable it is relative to the web dashboard. Feature requests and bugs go through their in-app feedback button, not GitHub Issues — that's a deliberate choice but means the public issue tracker isn't the real one.