Support more countries for payments

[birkjernstrom]

Polar is built using Stripe Connect and has enabled all of their supported countries for payments. Separately, not all of them are supported for payouts even though a lot are.

In the future, we want to expand support for more payment- and payout providers, e.g PayPal, Wise, to support developers in more countries.

This thread is a great place for developers to request their specific countries & to subscribe and engage to get updates in the future.

[ceolinwill]

Thanks for creating this, @birkjernstrom. I'd love to see Brazil in the list.

Actually, I thought Stripe Connect supported it. It does show up on their availability list and I know GitHub Sponsors supports it (which also uses Connect). But it says it depends on "your platform's country". Just curious: Is Polar registered in the US or Sweden?

[birkjernstrom]

I'll email our contacts at Stripe and check with them re: Brazil in this particular case. Just at least to better understand why we're not seeing it in our settings, but it seems to be available in other cases.

Yes, I wouldn't recommend creating more entities than needed. It's not only 2x overhead, but becomes more and especially if they're connected (transfer pricing regulations etc...). @wceolin Feel free to DM me on our Discord (https://discord.gg/BZw96tszTX) and we can work together to try and resolve this one way or another. But otherwise, I'll loop back once I've heard from Stripe and am better informed as to the nuances here.

[ceolinwill]

I suspect it might have something to do with the connected account type.

I was trying to set up Stripe Connect for my business yesterday and I noticed only Brazil and Mexico were available to me when using Express accounts - but all countries were available when using the Standard option.

I think that might be the option GitHub Sponsors is using because Standard accounts are handled by Stripe itself - and they have extra requirements. I recall having to do some extra verifications when I enabled GitHub Sponsors in my account, so I suspect they're using the Standard option.

[birkjernstrom]

I think you're right and it does make sense. From the last Stripe Session there is a lot happening with these forms of Connect being standardized into one and that customization is more granular with embeddable components vs. redirecting to Stripe (Express UI). Going to be interesting to see how that impacts these differentiations in terms of market availability.

I'll chat with Stripe soon and will be sure to dig into this a bit to get more context.

[thlmenezes]

Any updates on Brazil support in 2025?

I believe the support is still missing by the docs available here https://docs.polar.sh/merchant-of-record/supported-countries#payouts

[rishi-raj-jain]

Hi @thlmenezes,

Brazil support is not released with Polar yet since it's Polar is a US platform on Stripe. It would require Polar as a platform to be registered in the EU for instance, but we'll do that within the next 4-6 months and operate multiple platform accounts under the hood and integrate other PSPs and Payout options as well next year. So definitely something we hope to support and sorry we can't in the short-term 😔

[m4rrc0]

-> EUR (Belgium)

Hey. I wanted to use Polar in Belgium.

Not being able to change the currency to euro is a deal breaker. I am so sad! I was really pumped up at the idea of finally setting up some payment automation with Polar and was really disappointed to discover this. 😢

Also no way to specify if VAT has to be charged or not... I thought this would be configurable on Stripe's side but there is actually nothing we can configure on Stripe's side apparently?

[pseuss]

+1 for Euro (Germany)

It would be nice to be able to use polar.sh in Germany as well.

[philippdormann]

+1 for EUR support (really want to use polar.sh in Germany)

[matmkian]

+1 so hyped about Polar, can't use it in France :-(

[Wuemeli]

+1