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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://polar.sh/docs/llms.txt

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As a Merchant of Record (MoR), Polar resells your digital goods and services on your behalf. To do this responsibly, we verify that every business using Polar complies with our Acceptable Use Policy, and we continuously monitor transactions to prevent fraud, abuse, and high-risk activity. We process every review as quickly as we can and resolve every single one.

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First payout review

Build first, submit second. It’s tempting to get approved before doing the integration work, but a complete setup is what makes a review fast and clean. Configure your products and benefits, wire up your integration (checkout links, API keys, webhooks), and have a live website pointing to it. The more we can see end-to-end, the more confidently — and quickly — we can approve your account.
Before your first payout, you’ll go through our main account review. You can submit everything yourself from Finance → Account in your Polar dashboard, in three steps:
  1. Submit for approval. Tell us about your business, your products, and how you intend to use Polar.
  2. Identity verification (KYC). Verify your identity with a passport, ID card, or driver’s license along with a selfie — secure, easy, and quick through Stripe Identity.
  3. Connect a payout account. Set up a payout account via Stripe Connect Express so we can transfer your earnings to you.
Initial reviews can take up to 14 days to complete, depending on volume, weekends, and holidays. This review keeps us compliant with our Acceptable Use Policy and meets our own KYC/AML requirements as a billing platform.

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Continuous reviews

We continuously monitor all transactions across our platform to proactively prevent fraud, and we run asynchronous reviews of accounts at certain sales thresholds. Most of these reviews don’t require any additional information from you. While a review is in progress, payouts are temporarily paused — so you may notice that you can’t withdraw your balance until the review is resolved. Your customers are unaffected: new purchases keep going through, and existing subscriptions renew as usual. In a continuous review, we look at two things: that your use case is still within our Acceptable Use Policy and consistent with what was approved during your first review, and that your account is in good financial health — refunds, chargebacks, and risk scores across recent transactions.
Chargebacks and card networks. Credit card networks (e.g. Visa, Mastercard) consider chargebacks above 0.7% of sales excessive. Exceeding that threshold can lead to monitoring programs with extra costs, penalties, and ultimately termination from the network. We might reach out proactively to collaborate on lowering your chargeback ratio before it approaches these thresholds.

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Operational Guidelines

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Customer Support

You’re responsible for supporting your own customers. The volume of support requests we receive about your account, and how you handle them when we loop you in, both factor into our reviews. When we include you in a customer support thread, we expect a response within 48 hours. If we don’t hear back, we may refund the affected customers and issue a warning. Repeated unresponsiveness leads to offboarding.

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Test Transactions

Don’t run test purchases with real card details. Payment processors flag this as “card testing” and can block the card or your account, and it triggers our own account reviews. Use our sandbox environment instead. If you need to verify something in production, set up a free product or a 100% discount code so no real money changes hands.

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Chargeback Management

We hold accounts to a 0.4% chargeback rate — well below the 0.7% threshold the card networks themselves treat as excessive. Customers can file chargebacks up to 120 days after a transaction, so we monitor these continuously. If your rate climbs toward our threshold, we’ll reach out first to collaborate on bringing it down. If that doesn’t work, we may take the following actions, in order of severity:
  1. Refund individual transactions as needed.
  2. Pause payouts pending review, until the 120-day chargeback window for those transactions has closed.
  3. Pause future payments.
  4. Block the account and refund customers.
We don’t take any of these actions lightly and always try to resolve issues with you first.
We integrate with credit card networks to receive early chargeback signals before they’re officially filed. Below a certain transaction value, we automatically refund and cancel any related subscription to reduce chargebacks proactively.

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Policy Violations

When an account violates our Acceptable Use Policy — separately from chargeback issues — we offboard the merchant. Payment processing is blocked and payouts are paused pending review. If we suspect fraud or intentional abuse, we block the account immediately. Otherwise, we reach out and give you 48 hours to respond; failure to respond may result in refunds to affected customers. We may also run test transactions ourselves to verify account status. We aim to work with you on the best path forward, but for compliance and risk reasons we have to cancel subscriptions and refund payments made in violation of the policy.

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FAQ

Your account may go through multiple reviews as your business grows. We perform continuous reviews at certain sales thresholds to maintain platform integrity and prevent fraud. This is a standard practice across payment platforms and is part of our ongoing risk management process.
We request social media information as part of our identity verification and fraud prevention processes. This helps us:
  • Verify that you’re a real business or creator with an online presence
  • Understand your products and services better
  • Ensure compliance with our acceptable use policies
Providing accurate social media information helps speed up the review process and demonstrates the legitimacy of your business.
No, your social media settings are not publicly visible. This information is used internally for verification and compliance purposes only. We treat all merchant information with strict confidentiality and use it solely for risk assessment and account review processes.
To help us verify that everything is working correctly in line with our acceptable use policy, our team would ask you to share a 100% discount code by email. This is our preferred method, as it allows the team to go through the full journey themselves and confirm the automated fulfillment from an unpaid user to a paid user.Alternatively, you can provide a video recording that clearly shows the complete flow from an unpaid user to a paid user, including how the product is automatically accessible after purchase.
To transfer admin ownership of an organization:
  1. Invite the new admin to the team via Settings > Members in the Polar dashboard
  2. Ask that new admin to complete identity verification under Finance > Account after logging in via that email in the Polar dashboard
  3. Make sure no payout is pending
  4. Send an email from the current admin email to our support confirming the transfer to the new admin
If you need assistance with changing organization ownership or have special circumstances, please contact support@polar.sh.