Why I decided to migrate away from Stripe

A developer shares their experience migrating from Stripe to Polar.sh, a merchant of record payment provider. The primary motivation was eliminating the burden of sales tax compliance, registration, and remittance across multiple jurisdictions. While Stripe excels at payment processing, it doesn't handle tax remittance, requiring manual quarterly filings that became increasingly time-consuming. Polar.sh offers a 4% fee (vs Stripe's 2.9%) but assumes legal responsibility for sales, handling all tax compliance automatically. The migration involved database schema changes, adapting to differences in product/price models and customer references, and implementing the Polar SDK alongside existing Stripe infrastructure. The author found the tradeoff worthwhile for reclaiming time previously spent on tax paperwork.