Polar Software Inc.

About

It’s never been easier to build software. From open source having pushed the envelope of developer velocity to AI now accelerating the trend and making software development accessible to more people.

It’s never been easier to ship and scale software. Cloud platforms and modern PaaS solutions like Vercel and Supabase have drastically simplified global software deployment and scaling.

But, it’s never been harder to monetize software. We've moved from one-time purchases to SaaS, and now toward usage-based and agentic payments. Each evolution has enabled new category defining businesses, but also added complexity and billing anxiety for developers and their customers alike.

This is a bottleneck for the future.

We believe the next unicorns will be created by individual developers. As lines blur between indie hackers, startups, and enterprises, we're building Polar to empower solo builders and early-stage startups – the future enterprises, without the headcount. How?

• Monetization vs. Billing Platform. Billing is a crucial part of your customer relationship, but only a part of it - it's the outcome vs. input. We aim to bridge the gap between product analytics, CRM, and billing, providing a comprehensive platform for one-developer unicorns to scale their businesses.

• Usage-based on Autopilot. Automatic event ingestion for OpenAI, Anthropic, Vercel AI SDK to S3 consumption and more – easily track, credit and bill customers for their usage. We’re going to ship a lot of innovative features in this category to make usage-based and agentic payments a delight for developers and their customers.

• Zero Boilerplate. We obsess over reducing the lines of code in your codebase that aren't unique to your business, from automating common SaaS entitlements like license keys and usage-based credits to condensing integrations down to just four lines of code.

• Zero Operations. Grow globally without being held back by international sales tax, compliance, fraud, or chargeback protection – leave it all to us as your merchant of record.

• Open Source. Built for transparency and designed for contributions to shape the future with our community.

Principles

Momentum is Culture

From experience, we're not big on cultural values. Why? People and their actions define culture, not words. People show up excited and at their best when there is momentum. So we've seen at earlier startups that cultural values are a snapshot of when teams hit their strides.

So we focus on keeping, celebrating and accelerating momentum. Allowing culture to be continuously improved and fluid vs. fixed.

Ship → Refactor → Scale

Our #1 focus and drive is shipping and growing great product experiences that solves real problems for developers and their users. We celebrate pragmatic duct taping behind the scenes and consider scalability, performance and optimization efforts a reward, not our initial focus.

Reduce complexity, not quality

We seek to constantly move faster, but not at the cost of poor product experiences. Simplicity and opinionated iterations vs. perfection are key to enable this and we prioritize it across everything we do. Autonomy and accountability vs. processes. Opinionated design vs. 10 A/B tests. Render vs. K8s etc.

Do your life's work

We're not a 9-5 nor 24/7. We don't track time nor search for people who count it down. We love to work and pour our heart into what we build to continuously push the envelope of our creativity and productivity.

Open Roles