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.

Setup annual prices

Let's edit one of our existing subscription tiers at $5/month to be $48/year - offering a classic 20% discount.

You'll notice a new button above: Add yearly pricing. Clickety, click, click.

Now we can enter 48, hit Save and we're done. Our first annual subscription tier.

Annual only?

Next to each price point (monthly or annually) there's an ❌-button. Just click it to remove that offering and hit Save.

Making it entirely possible to offer annual-only tiers. Just like existing tiers are only offered at a monthly price until you specifically add annual prices.

Offering more choices to subscribers

Subscribers can then easily toggle subscription tiers to show monthly or annual pricing with monthly as the default.

Once I switch to Yearly the tiers are updated instantly.

Wait, where did the third tier go? Since it only offered a monthly plan, it was automatically hidden to only showcase available options for the users desired billing plan.

How do they pay?

Subscribers pay the amount upfront and in full. So either $5 for the upcoming month from today or $48 for the upcoming year. Including potential sales taxes or value-added tax (VAT), e.g 25% for a Swede like me.

They can choose their desired billing plan for each subscription, i.e pay annually towards one organization and monthly to another individual developer.

From MRR to Earnings

Up until now, we showed MRR insights within your Polar dashboard. It's now called Earnings instead since it can include upfront annual subscriptions too.

We could have shown annual subscriptions in terms of their relative monthly contribution to stick with MRR. However, we decided (GitHub Discussion) it would only be confusing and cause cognitive overload. It's better to show earnings that map to real cash flow and what's available to withdraw.

Just getting started

We're thrilled to introduce this feature today since it's been highly requested. However, we can already hear you thinking: What about...

• Pay once, i.e products (merchandise, downloads, license keys etc)
• One off donations
• ... and more

Well, let's just say that we won't disappoint in the coming months ahead 😉

After all, our mission is to build a platform empowering open source- and indie developers to get paid working on their passions. So it's in our wheelhouse. On that note...

PS. Polar is an official GitHub funding option now

Make sure to link your Polar page on GitHub - we're an official funding option on GitHub since February 15th 🎉 It's super easy and only takes a minute - checkout the GitHub docs on how

Also if you love our mission and the product we're building, we'd highly appreciate you sharing it with friends, followers & collaborators. Be it on Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub or AFK. We're building Polar open source and want the entire community to be a part of shaping the the long-term product. So we greatly appreciate & welcome social shares ♥️🐻‍❄️

We're here to serve.

Until next time, The Polar Team