We developers & software engineers are all content creators. We often write code for other people through open source projects. But no platform which integrates your GitHub-endeavours with community engagement exists. Until now.

We've been hard at work since October to pave the way for a new direction – shaping Polar to become a the go-to creator platform for developers. We're so happy to unveil three big new features - Subscriptions, Benefits & Posts.

We wanted to build something which makes it possible for software engineers to offer premium content to fans & supporters, in exchange for a monthly subscription, allowing developers to earn some money on their open source initiatives.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions on Polar are exactly what you think it is - a recurring, monthly subscription which unlocks benefits and access to premium content. As a creator, you can configure your subscription tiers to your liking.

Subscription Tier Types

Subscription tiers can be one of three types — Free, Individual & Business.

Free Tier Type

The free tier type comes by default when you become a Creator on Polar. It can be used to leverage benefits that you’re willing to offer to anyone for free.

Individual Tier Type

The individual tier type is the baseline type which are meant for paying individual users.

Business Tier Type

Use the business tier type for tiers which are meant for big companies & corporations.

Analytics

Statistics and analytics are important when measuring success for any kind of creator business. That's why we've made sure to aggregate the most important bits of information about your subscriptions in an overview page.

VAT & Taxes

As we are building a platform to empower open source maintainers to offer value-add content, services and subscriptions to their backers, such value-add services are often subject to international taxation. Calculating, capturing and remitting them to separate governmental agencies is an impossible overhead and ask from individual maintainers.

Polar is therefore proud to be the merchant of record and manage value-add taxes for subscriptions offered by maintainers.

Benefits

We have spent a lot of effort to build a super flexible benefits system, which is built on top of the Subscriptions layer. Benefits are tied to Subscription tiers, and are automatically granted to user's subscription status. Want to invite users from a specific subscription tier to a specific Discord channel? That will be possible with the kind of benefits we're going to build, and we aim to extend that benefit offering greatly this upcoming year.

Posts

What you’re currently reading is a Post on Polar. It was the first benefit which was built. It’s a perfect way to distribute a newsletter or simple blog posts. There are two types of Posts - Public and Premium. Public posts are by default enabled for the free tier. Premium posts is a benefit which you can add to your paid individual & business tiers.

Email

We've made sure to make the post feature as close to a newsletter experience as possible. Which means that we've integrated a robust email solution, delivering your posts directly to your subscriber's email inbox.

Markdown

Our posts editor supports Markdown out of the box. And as a bonus, we’ve added a few custom components which adds more value to your posts. The markdown editor has drag-and-drop functionality, making it super easy to insert images into your posts.

Paywall

Want to create a public newsletter with a few sections catered to your paying audience? Use the Paywall component to hide a certain section from your free subscribers, but which is visible to your paying subscribers. It looks something like this for non-paying subscribers:

This is the biggest feature release we've done since the start in 2023. We hope you like them as much as we do. We see so much potential in this, and can't wait to help you developers succeed like never before.

Start building your community today or visit our docs for more information.