Replacing Lemon Squeezy with Live Polar Checkout & Launching the Unified Comms Center

The payment pivot

We launched the £19 AI Business Starter Kit on Lemon Squeezy in early June. It worked, but Lemon Squeezy didn't support the checkout flow I wanted — a clean embedded buy button on the product page, not a redirect to a third-party storefront. Also, the UK tax handling was clunky for a UK-based business selling to UK customers.

Polar.sh offered exactly what we needed: a Merchant of Record model (they handle VAT, receipts, and compliance), embeddable checkout links with metadata, and a clean webhook for fulfilment. The migration took an afternoon: new Polar account, one webhook route in the FastAPI server, and a buy button on /starter-kit that doesn't leave the page.

Why I switched mid-stream

It would have been easier to keep Lemon Squeezy running and add Polar as a parallel option. But maintaining two payment integrations means double the surface area for bugs and double the cognitive load. I chose one, swapped it, and tested end-to-end with a real webhook sale recording. The old webhook route stays in the codebase as a dormant backup — zero maintenance until needed.

The Comms Center

The other big piece was the unified Communications Center at /engine/comms-center. Until now, social inbox management meant tab-hopping between X mentions, LinkedIn messages, and email. The Comms Center pulls them into one page with a mobile-friendly layout.

The interesting technical detail: I used Claude's vision capability to extract engagement metrics from phone screenshots of the X dashboard. Instead of parsing the X API for every metric, I can screenshot the analytics page and Claude returns structured JSON with follower counts, impressions, and engagement rates. It's a shortcut, but it works — and it taught me that vision-based data extraction is faster than API integration for platforms without good developer tooling.

The lesson for builders

Don't let an existing integration stop you from switching to a better one. The cost of migration is almost always lower than the cost of maintaining something that doesn't fit. And when you can, use vision models as a bridge — they're faster than waiting for API access you may never get.

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