Products
Create digital products on Polar in minutes
Everything is a product
Subscriptions or pay once products are both considered a product in Polar (API & data model). Just with different pricing & billing logic. So both are shown & managed under Products with the ability to filter based on pricing model.
Create a product
Name & Description
Starting off with the basic.
- Name The title of your product.
- Description Markdown is supported here too.
Pricing
Determine how you want to charge your customers for this product.
Billing cycle
- One-time purchase Customer is charged once and gets access to the product forever.
- Monthly Customer is charged every month.
- Yearly Customer is charged every year.
Pricing type
- Fixed price Set a fixed price for the product.
- Pay what you want Let customers decide how much they want to pay.
- Free No charge for the product.
Price
For fixed price products, set the amount you want to charge.
For pay what you want products, you can set a minimum amount and a default amount that will be preset on checkout.
Billing cycle and pricing type cannot be changed after the product is created.
What if I want both a monthly and yearly pricing?
Polar has a unique approach to what the industry typically calls variants. Each product has a single pricing model, but you can create multiple products with different pricing models, and showcase them both at checkout.
Product Media
- You can upload public product images to be displayed on product pages
- They can be up to 10MB each
- You can remove and re-arrange images
Checkout Fields
You can collect additional information from your customers at checkout. This can be useful for things like phone number, terms of service agreement or specific data you need to collect.
Fields are managed from your organization settings, and you can choose which fields to show on a per-product basis, and set if they are required or not. We support the following field types:
- Text
- Number
- Date
- Checkbox
- Select
The data collected will be available in the order and subscription details.
Automated Entitlements
Finally, you can enable or create new entitlements (what we call Benefits) that you tie to the product.
Read more in our product benefits guide on how they work and how to customize the built-in ones we offer:
- License Keys
- Discord Server Role
- GitHub Repository Access
- File Downloads
- Custom Benefit
Variants
Polar has a unique approach regarding what the industry typically calls variants.
We believe having a single product with multiple pricing models and benefits adds unneccessary complexity to the user and to the API. Instead, we chose to treat everything as a product, giving you maximum flexibility about the pricing and benefits you want to offer.
You can showcase several products at checkout, allowing the customer to switch between them. Typically, you can offer a monthly and a yearly product, with specific pricing and benefits for each. Read more about how to do so using Checkout Links or the Checkout Session API.
Update a product
You can edit any product details, except the billing cycle and pricing type.
For fixed price products, you can change the price. Existing subscribers will remain on their current pricing.
If you add benefits, existing subscribers will get them automatically. If you remove benefits, existing subscribers will lose access to them.
Archive a product
Products on Polar can’t be deleted, but they can be archived. You can do so by clicking the Archive button on the bottom right of the product page.
Existing customers will keep their access to the product, and subscriptions will continue to renew. However, the product will no longer be available for new purchases.
It’s possible to unarchive a product using the Products Update API.
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