For Pricing That Evolves
The honest tradeoffs between Flowglad and others - so you can choose the right foundation for your business.
Stripe
Powerful primitives, but you’re on your own. Stripe gives you a write-layer, then leaves you to reconcile events, model billing state, and manage pricing logic inside your app. That means stitching together webhooks, handling event mismatches, and maintaining a parallel system of record. Flowglad handles all of that for you: single source of truth, no webhooks, and 90% less boilerplate.
Choose Stripe if you want control over every layer. Choose Flowglad if you want billing infrastructure off your plate - so you can focus on product growth, not payment events.
Polar
Simple Stripe abstraction for simple use cases. If your pricing model won’t evolve much, Polar’s Stripe wrapper is a pleasant way to get started. But if you plan to experiment - usage tiers, price localization, feature gating - it gets harder to adapt without accruing debt.
Flowglad was designed for iteration. We isolate pricing into catalogs, version them safely, and make it easy to adapt over time without rewriting core logic. Our SDK runs across your stack - frontend and backend - so you can manage pricing dynamically, without breaking your app.
Autumn
Friendly interface over Stripe Billing. Autumn helps you work with Stripe’s billing stack more easily. However, that stack - Stripe Payments, Stripe Billing, then Autumn - adds cost and constraint. You’re still subject to the design limits of Stripe Billing and the operational friction of reconciling state across multiple services.
Flowglad is structurally different. We’re not built on Stripe. That gives us tighter integration, lower overhead, and more control over the full billing lifecycle. It’s how we support native usage-based billing, local acquiring, and pricing models Stripe doesn’t natively support.