Polar

Dear builders,

We’re thrilled to announce Polar v1.0 today with better pricing!

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Today, we're excited to introduce license keys at Polar!

Making it seamless to sell access to premium software without the headache of managing billing, international sales tax and real-time validations yourself.

So you can focus on building your product. Leave the boring stuff to us.

Our mission at Polar is for developers to get paid coding on their passions. Empowering open source- and indie developers to build independent careers and businesses. All the way from first donation to IPO.

Today, we're introducing OAuth & Webhooks to support developers to build custom community- and customer experiences across their docs, sites and services.

Enabling use cases like:

• Celebrate & reward sponsors, donors & issue backers on your sites
• Grant access to online courses
• Unlock premium content for subscribers
• Enable cloud services for customers

We can't wait to see what you build 🚀 Have an exciting idea and want to build it open source? Join our Discord and let's chat - we'd love to sponsor a few promising efforts ♥️

Today, we're thrilled to announce two big - new - features towards our vision of building the all-in-one funding & monetization platform for developers.

You can now write premium posts for paid subscribers that are automatically made public at a later date ♥️

It's a great option for open source initiatives. You can write posts knowing they will become available to the public domain. Yet, still offer a membership perk for those who help make the initiative sustainable. Win-win.

We launched donations over the weekend a bit in silence. It's also off by default - you need to enable it. Despite this, a few developers quickly caught on and have already received hundreds of dollars in donations within 48 hours 😍

Let's see what happens now that the feature is announced properly. We also can't wait to tell you about a few things it will empower in the near future.

By Birk Jernström

Today, I'm honoured to announce that Mitchell Hashimoto is joining Polar as an advisor! In this post, I want to share why I'm personally so excited to work with him on our mission to get developers paid to code on their passions.

Today, we're thrilled to introduce the @polar-sh/astro package - offering seamless publishing of your Astro content to your page on Polar.

Astro is an incredible static-first web framework loved by countless developers. Chances are you've built your personal site & blog with it. Well, now it's painless to keep your blog & Polar profile up-to-date without any manual effort.

So naturally, we're thrilled. But the coolest part & what makes us over the moon about this is that we had no part in it. It was contributed to us by the incredible @isaacharrisholt who uses both Astro & Polar himself.

That's the power of open source 🚀🎉

Today, we've shipped some improvements to the Finance page on Polar along with some big & important changes to how payouts work ahead of April 1st when Stripe fees will be incurred.

Great news: You can now offer annual subscriptions with Polar 🌍↺🌞

Up until now, subscriptions have only been monthly. Today, we're introducing the ability to setup subscription tiers to be priced monthly, annually or both - offering complete flexibility.

It's been a highly requested feature lately so we're delighted to introduce it today - let's take a look at how it works.

This is only relevant for users who have installed the Polar GitHub App. Not users who have signed up with their GitHub account (OAuth) only.

The Polar GitHub App no longer requires administration permissions 🔒✅

You can now install the app to highlight repositories, enable crowdfunding for issues and more to come - all without granting this sensitive permission. We have also dropped the permission from existing installations that had granted it. No action is required on your side.

Administration permission is still required to offer access to private GitHub repositories as a subscription benefit. Enabling everything from early access programs, sponsorware, open core models to pure software sales.

However, it's now requested via a separate & dedicated GitHub App instead and only if and when you enable this feature specifically.

You can now easily link your Polar page under the "Sponsor this project" section on GitHub - it looks absolutely beautiful 😍

This is huge and all thanks to @matmair and our wonderful community! You made this happen, together. We're truly honoured and grateful to serve this amazing community of talented, passionate & kind developers.

You can now seamlessly offer subscribers on Polar access to one, two, three... or countless private GitHub repositories 🎉 This opens up and streamlines unlimited possibilities, monetization- and funding models.

Featuring corporate logotypes in READMEs, sites & docs is one of the most common & efficient ways of getting commercial funding in open source. However, upselling and managing this offering has been entirely manual & coordinated over email - it's painful for everyone.

At Polar, we're building the creator platform for developers and the open source ecosystem. Empowering you to setup free- and paid subscriptions to your audience with built-in benefits that are seamless for you to manage and delightful for your audience to consume.

We're all used to getting pricing updates in this market that ruin our day. But not today. Not this update.

We're proud to share that our updated pricing is:

• 5% + payment & payout fees (Stripe) instead of our former 10% + payment & payout fees.
• No fixed monthly costs
• We'll also cover Stripe fees from our 5% until March 31st, 2024.

It's already in effect.

Why?

Today, we're thrilled to announce & launch the next chapter of Polar.

A creator platform for developers and the open source ecosystem – built open source (fork us on GitHub).

Today, we're incredibly excited to announce contributor rewards with Polar.

You can think of it as bounties, but don't worry – it's designed for maintainers and your communities for a change.

How?

Empowering maintainers vs. steamrolling them

Your scarcest resources as an open source maintainer is time & capital. Bounties have historically been a tax on both.

Excited to share another changelog post today of the efforts we’ve shipped over the last two weeks. Focusing on removing friction for backers to fund even more towards your impactful open source efforts. Let’s dig into it.

New funding page