What can Polar be used for?

[JoshCantCode]

Apologies if this is answered somewhere, I haven't looked everywhere just yet.

Does Polar only work in the context of products? Or is it a payment platform similar to stripe? I'm planning on using it for a wager website (where 2 users have accounts with money on it, and 2 people can compete against each other to win a sum of money compiled from a deduction from both of their accounts). Is Polar a 1 time payment processing infrastructure?

[birkjernstrom]

Hey @JoshCantCode.

Yes, our focus is exclusively on digital products and services (SaaS) and for the sales of such software. We do not have a Stripe Connect-like product in the sense that customers can integrate Polar for the purpose of distributing money within their own service. Since we're a merchant of record such a product offering is a lot trickier from a compliance and risk perspective. So it's not a focus of ours at the moment, but we hope to change that status quo long-term.

However, having said all that, I'm afraid we cannot support gambling as a category. Today, we're built on Stripe, but will expand to more PSPs in the future, but we need to comply with their terms and vet against onboarding accounts that violate their prohibited or restricted businesses. Gambling as a category is often heavily restricted or prohibited and therefore it's prohibited on Polar.

[amacfie]

I'd just like to say that a feature like Stripe Connect would be useful to me -- something that would allow me to run a marketplace where sellers can onboard and set up a Polar account that's controlled by the marketplace, so that customers can pay sellers directly, possibly with a fee going to the marketplace. The sellers would all be selling the same kind of product, like https://www.cameo.com/.