Our team is growing and new features, enhancements and bug fixes are shipped daily. Since Polar is open source anyone can see, contribute and follow along our daily progress & backlog, but... It's a bit verbose :-)

So we'll start keeping a changelog to highlight some of the gems. Let's dive right into some of the highlights from the last month.

Funding goals

Does some effort come with a certain - fixed - cost? Or do you have a specific goal in mind? You can now remove the guesswork and set an explicit & public goal for backers to pledge behind.

Of course, it's reflected directly in the badge on GitHub for all backers to see. Together, they can pool funding to reach the goal or surpass it.

Reward contributors on completion

You're merging a PR that closes out an issue for a feature request - it's such a great feeling. Better still, backers have shown their support by pooling funds behind it. #todayinopensource is not too shabby.

However, you couldn't have done it without Lisa. She made a contribution earlier that laid the groundwork for this to happen. So you want to reward her efforts too.

Well, now you can. When marking an issue as completed you can add anyone who deserves a reward.

Can you set rewards upfront? Oh so soon :-) We're working on this now. Join our Discord where we're building in public and have shared designs on what this will look like.

Backer dashboard

In order to drive more funding towards maintainers (our mission) we need to create a world-class experience for backers.

So we shipped a dedicated dashboard for them with some delights:

• Add issues to fund
• Track their funded issues
• See recommended issues to fund based on GitHub stars, popularity and more.
• Save payment method on file
• Receive rewards as contributors

We'll continue improving this experience for individuals and teams to help drive more funding towards maintainers.

API (Early alpha)

We're thrilled that a lot of maintainers are excited about Polar - sharing a ton of superb feedback and feature requests (keep them coming). Since we're all developers, they are often in the form of: "If there was an endpoint for X, I'd love to do Y".

So from here on out, we're going to continuously build against a public API. Enabling you to push the boundaries and integrate Polar within your communities, sites and services.

But we're excited to already share an early alpha version of our public API today. Lots still to do, but we wanted to launch it super early to iteratively improve it together with you, your feedback and use cases.

As an example, using our new public API, Gustav on our team built a GitHub action to generate & commit markdown of issues to fund for a given repository. You can use it to easily integrate an up-to-date list of fundable issues within your docs or static sites. Super cool!

Join our Discord where we're sharing early design sketches for feedback, discussing feature development and more. Great place to share your API use cases and to discuss any improvements needed in our API to empower it. We can't wait to hear from you!

That's it for this update. In the future, we'll share a changelog update for individual features (max once weekly).

/ Polar Team