Support more countries for payments

[birkjernstrom]

Polar is built using Stripe Connect and has enabled all of their supported countries for payments. Separately, not all of them are supported for payouts even though a lot are.

In the future, we want to expand support for more payment- and payout providers, e.g PayPal, Wise, to support developers in more countries.

This thread is a great place for developers to request their specific countries & to subscribe and engage to get updates in the future.

[wceolin]

Thanks for creating this, @birkjernstrom. I'd love to see Brazil in the list.

Actually, I thought Stripe Connect supported it. It does show up on their availability list and I know GitHub Sponsors supports it (which also uses Connect). But it says it depends on "your platform's country". Just curious: Is Polar registered in the US or Sweden?

[birkjernstrom]

Of course – thanks for reaching out about it too 🙂

Yes, we're using Stripe Connect as a US business (Polar Software Inc). I took a look at our settings again to confirm that Brazil is not listed there amongst the ~120 countries available to us. Interesting if it's available for non-US platforms; I'll have to check with our contacts at Stripe why that is and whether it might change in the near-term.

Otherwise, setting up a subsidiary in EU with a separate Stripe account is something that has come up for other reasons to, e.g PayPal support and more. So that might be an option, but is technically and operationally a bit challenging in other regards vs. integrating other payment- and payout providers directly. So need to research it a bit more.

We're still in the "Get to 1.0"-phase, but getting close (~0.8). Our strategy has been to get there and have the foundations in-place before we start focusing more on expansion (currencies, markets, payment- and payout providers etc). But I hope that will be a big focus for us starting next year.

[wceolin]

Got it, thanks. I'm wondering if Brazil support is something like invite-only. Or maybe it's only available to individuals - not organizations - because GitHub Sponsors works for my personal account but not for my org's, for example.

I'm actually considering creating a US entity using Stripe Atlas but I'm not sure yet because I do need my Brazilian entity for some local business and keeping two entities as a solo founder might be too much work 😅

[birkjernstrom]

I'll email our contacts at Stripe and check with them re: Brazil in this particular case. Just at least to better understand why we're not seeing it in our settings, but it seems to be available in other cases.

Yes, I wouldn't recommend creating more entities than needed. It's not only 2x overhead, but becomes more and especially if they're connected (transfer pricing regulations etc...). @wceolin Feel free to DM me on our Discord (https://discord.gg/BZw96tszTX) and we can work together to try and resolve this one way or another. But otherwise, I'll loop back once I've heard from Stripe and am better informed as to the nuances here.

[wceolin]

I suspect it might have something to do with the connected account type.

I was trying to set up Stripe Connect for my business yesterday and I noticed only Brazil and Mexico were available to me when using Express accounts - but all countries were available when using the Standard option.

I think that might be the option GitHub Sponsors is using because Standard accounts are handled by Stripe itself - and they have extra requirements. I recall having to do some extra verifications when I enabled GitHub Sponsors in my account, so I suspect they're using the Standard option.

[birkjernstrom]

I think you're right and it does make sense. From the last Stripe Session there is a lot happening with these forms of Connect being standardized into one and that customization is more granular with embeddable components vs. redirecting to Stripe (Express UI). Going to be interesting to see how that impacts these differentiations in terms of market availability.

I'll chat with Stripe soon and will be sure to dig into this a bit to get more context.