Forget Stripe: The Easiest Way to Add Payments

This video demonstrates integrating Polar as a payment gateway into a Next.js SaaS that uses BetterAuth, enabling users to buy credits for AI-generated plushies. It covers sandbox setup, product creation, webhook configuration with ngrok, transaction tracking, error debugging, and deploying to production. The tutorial also adds admin product management, automatic credit refresh, and a free starter credit for new users.

– Integration: Use the BetterAuth Polar plugin to connect checkout, portal and webhooks; configure product IDs and environment-specific values.
– Sandbox & testing: Create sandbox products, generate access tokens and webhook secrets, and expose a dev server with ngrok for webhook delivery.
– Webhooks & reliability: Implement async webhook handling, record transactions in a dedicated table, and troubleshoot event/function sync between dev and prod.
– Deployment & admin: Move product configuration to a database table, add an admin UI to manage products and IDs, and demonstrate production setup with discount testing.

Quotes:

Polar is the merchant of record — they handle taxes so you don’t have to.

In development, we don’t want to use real credit cards — start in sandbox mode.

I passed error messages to Claude until everything worked.