Craftgate vs Polar

Craftgate is an Istanbul-based payment orchestration platform for Turkish merchants. Instead of integrating each bank's virtual POS separately, a merchant connects its existing POS agreements and payment providers to Craftgate once and manages them through a single API and dashboard, routing every transaction to the most suitable provider and reducing dependency on any single acquirer.

The platform covers smart routing rules based on card type, bank, installment count or cost, automatic fallback to another POS when a provider fails, installment tables and campaigns, a hosted checkout form and payment links, card storage for repeat payments, fraud rules, and marketplace features for sub-merchant onboarding and split payouts. Reporting brings transactions from every bank into one view, which simplifies reconciliation, and SDKs and plugins help with integration into custom sites and common e-commerce platforms. Pricing is not public and is agreed with each merchant, typically based on transaction volume.

Craftgate suits mid-size and large merchants, marketplaces and subscription businesses that already have several bank POS agreements and want better approval rates, lower costs and resilience. Very small merchants without their own bank agreements are usually better served by an all-in-one payment service provider such as iyzico, PayTR, Param or Sipay, which handle the merchant relationship themselves. Global orchestration tools such as Spreedly or Primer have little coverage of Turkish banks and local installment practices.

Polar is an open-source merchant of record and monetization platform for developers, based in Stockholm and founded by Birk Jernström. It started as a way to fund open-source work and evolved into a full payments platform for selling SaaS subscriptions, digital products and access to software, with global tax compliance handled because Polar is the legal seller.

Polar provides hosted and embedded checkout, subscriptions with trials and upgrades, usage-based billing driven by metered events, license keys, a customer portal and discounts. A distinctive feature is benefits: purchases can automatically grant access to a private GitHub repository, a Discord role, file downloads or license keys, which suits developer products and paid communities. SDKs for TypeScript and Python, adapters for Next.js and other frameworks, webhooks and a public API make integration fast, and the codebase itself is open source. The free Starter plan charges 5% plus 50 cents per transaction, and paid plans from $20 a month lower that fee.

Polar fits indie developers, open-source maintainers and small SaaS teams that want low fees and developer-friendly tooling. As a young company it has fewer enterprise features, a smaller support team and less history than established providers. Lemon Squeezy, now owned by Stripe, offers a similar indie-friendly experience at higher fees, Paddle is better for larger SaaS companies needing invoicing and sales-assisted deals, and Stripe alone is cheaper if you can manage tax yourself.