How to pull Polar revenue and orders by date

Which Polar endpoint should you use for revenue?

Polar gives you two ways to answer "how much did we take last week" and they are not interchangeable.

/v1/metrics/ returns a precomputed series. /v1/orders/ returns the orders themselves. The first is one call and gives you a chart. The second is many calls and gives you the rows behind it.

Use metrics for a figure. Use orders when you need to know who, or what, or to apply a filter Polar does not offer.

Revenue from the metrics endpoint

curl -s 'https://api.polar.sh/v1/metrics/?start_date=2026-10-01&end_date=2026-10-08&interval=day&metrics=revenue&timezone=Europe/London' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer polar_oat_...'

What comes back is order subtotals in each period, before Polar's fees and before tax, in the organisation's currency.

Three words in that sentence matter.

Subtotals. Tax is excluded. A business selling to the EU takes considerably more at the card than this figure shows, and the difference is not yours to keep.

Before fees. This is gross. What lands in your bank is less Polar's cut, and that is a separate calculation.

The organisation's currency. Polar converts, so a multi-currency business gets one number rather than several. Useful, and worth knowing it happened.

Orders, when you need the rows

async function orders(token, from, to) {
  const rows = [];
  let page = 1;

  while (true) {
    const url = new URL("https://api.polar.sh/v1/orders/");
    url.searchParams.set("limit", "100");
    url.searchParams.set("page", String(page));

    const res = await fetch(url, { headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${token}` } });
    const body = await res.json();

    for (const order of body.items) {
      const at = new Date(order.created_at).getTime();
      if (at >= from && at < to) rows.push(order);
    }

    if (body.items.length < 100) break;
    page += 1;
  }

  return rows;
}

Polar pages with page and limit rather than a cursor, and pagination.max_page tells you when to stop if you would rather not infer it from a short page.

Each order carries the customer, the product, the subtotal, the tax and the net amount. That is what you need for a recent payments feed, and it is what you need to split revenue by product, which the metrics endpoint will not do.

Why your totals might not match

Summing order subtotals and asking the metrics endpoint for the same window should agree, and when they do not it is almost always one of three things.

Timezone. The metrics endpoint buckets in whatever timezone you passed. created_at on an order is UTC. Compare them without converting and every order near midnight is misfiled.

Refunded orders. An order refunded later still happened on the day it was placed. Both figures include it, which is correct and surprises people.

Pagination. A loop that stops at the first short page is right. A loop that stops when items is empty makes one wasted call. A loop that trusts a hardcoded page count is wrong the week you grow.

In the notch

Notch Metrics reports Polar revenue from the metrics endpoint, bucketed hourly, daily, weekly or monthly with a sparkline and a comparison against the previous window, and recent payments from the orders list as a feed of the last ten with who paid.

Both in the MacBook notch, both from one connection whose token never reaches your Mac. Everything Polar reports, or download Notch Metrics.