Spent years defaulting to Stripe. Turns out "merchant of record" was the decision I never actually made.

I've shipped products on Stripe for years and never questioned it. It's the default, it works.

Then I added Polar to my Nuxt boilerplate as a second option and had to actually understand the difference. Here's what I wish I'd figured out earlier.

With Stripe, you are the merchant. You're responsible for collecting and remitting sales tax and VAT everywhere you have customers. As a solo founder selling to the EU, that's VAT obligations from your first sale. Stripe Tax calculates it, but you still register and file yourself.

With Polar (a merchant of record), Polar is legally the seller. They handle all the tax. One payout, no compliance project.

The cost: Stripe is 2.9% + 30c. Polar just changed their pricing, the new default is 5% + 50c (with cheaper paid tiers if you do volume).

So for a while I was comparing the wrong thing. I kept looking at per-transaction fees when the actual decision was how much tax paperwork I wanted to own.

For a US-only project at low volume, Stripe is clearly cheaper. For selling digital products globally, the merchant of record premium is often cheaper than what you'd pay an accountant (or in stress) to stay compliant.

I ended up not picking. I made it switchable with one env var so you can start on Stripe and move to Polar when you actually go international. The right call genuinely depends on where your customers are.

(For context, I build NuxtBeyond, an AI-first Nuxt 4 boilerplate. This was just the latest thing I bolted on. I also wrote up the full Stripe vs Polar breakdown if anyone wants the deeper version.)

Anyone here actually moved from Stripe to a merchant of record? Curious whether the fee bump was worth it for you.