Billing

Start with the Self-Host overview if you want the full deployment picture first. This page focuses on Polar, plan enforcement, and AI credit metering.

Why Polar is enabled by default

Cossistant ships with Polar enabled by default because that is the same behavior the hosted product relies on:

• plan upgrades and downgrades go through Polar
• website subscriptions are resolved from Polar customer state
• AI credits are metered through Polar
• billing pages and customer portal flows assume Polar is available

That default is important because it keeps the repo aligned with the managed cloud behavior out of the box.

The self-hosted override

If you do not want any Polar dependency in your deployment, disable it explicitly:

CopyPOLAR_ENABLED=false

The parsing is strict:

• missing POLAR_ENABLED means Polar stays enabled
• POLAR_ENABLED=true keeps Polar enabled
• any other value disables Polar

What happens when billing is disabled

When POLAR_ENABLED=false, Cossistant switches into a self-hosted billing-disabled mode.

That means:

• Polar checkout and customer portal flows are bypassed
• Polar webhooks are not mounted
• organization creation does not create Polar customers
• website creation does not provision free subscriptions
• website deletion does not try to revoke Polar subscriptions
• AI credit metering is disabled
• plan limits and feature gates become effectively unlimited

In practice, the app resolves a synthetic self_hosted plan internally. That plan is used to keep the rest of the app simple:

• numeric limits are treated as unlimited
• boolean-gated features are treated as enabled
• AI training cooldown becomes immediate
• hard plan limits are not enforced

So the feature code keeps calling the same plan and entitlement helpers it already uses. The billing mode is centralized instead of spreading if/else checks across the product.

What the dashboard shows

When billing is disabled:

• the plan page shows a self-hosted state instead of hosted pricing copy
• upgrade and billing actions are hidden
• the billing route explains that subscription management is disabled for this deployment
• AI usage is shown as unmetered instead of as an outage or credit-sync problem

Recommended self-host default

If you are running Cossistant fully on your own infrastructure and do not want hosted billing behavior, set:

CopyPOLAR_ENABLED=false

If you want your self-host deployment to keep the same billing and metering behavior as Cossistant Cloud, leave POLAR_ENABLED unset or set it to true.