Birk from Polar here. We're building a platform for open source developers offering better funding & community tools. We're building it open source too: https://github.com/polarsource/polar
Here to answer any questions you might have. You can read more about this on our own Polar page for Polar: https://polar.sh/polarsource/posts/github-supports-polar-in-...
Have you thought about opening up the platform to more than just Github? Having Github be the sole source for all open source projects is not very healthy for the ecosystem. There are other platforms like Codeberg and Sourcehut.
We're big fans of other platforms and looking forward to expand our support. But main focus now is helping open source developers on GitHub get meaningfully more funding & helping more than a few work on it full-time to even start small businesses. Once we've achieved that & proved our product can make a big difference, it's time to expand.
The question strikes me as naive though, akin to asking "have you thought about using precious capital and momentum on .00001% (clearly exaggerated) of the DVCS market?"
The sad truth is "healthy for the ecosystem" isn't really profitable. I'm sure supporting other platforms is harmless in a roadmap/backlog, but seems like wasted effort early on in a company's development to split their focus.
Now onto the questions:
How does Polar compare to other open-centric platforms, such as OpenCollective?
The latter has some great transparency features, are you planning on implementing anything like that?
Thank you!
It can lead to difficult situations for maintainers, where they were not willing to accept some work and didn't have the chance to express this (yet) (lack of time for instance), and now they have a work that somebody else paid for but didn't really want to accept but rejecting it could be harder, emotionally. So you would need at least an okay from them.
In terms of fees its polar.sh at 5% + stripe connect at x (us region)? What's roughly the stripe fee expected?
Will expand as we can with Stripe. Long-term, in order to expand truly world-wide, I think we'll need to integrate support for other payment providers too. Definitely something we want. Just a question of short-term capabilities & main priority being to reach a v1 that truly makes a dent in open source funding. Expanding markets, platforms and more once we have.
Love to see more ways to keep open source sustainable. Thanks for the work you do. Hopefully Polar is very successful!
- Posts & newsletter support to build direct relationship with your community
- Subscriptions to offer sustainable & recurring funding
- Built-in subscription benefits: Premium posts, Discord invites, Automate sponsor logos in README/site/docs, access to private GitHub repo(s)
- Rewards: Split issue funding with contributors
- Merchant of record & handling VAT for the above
- Public API
We've also lowered our pricing to 5%.
It appears that there is now more of focus on subscriptions with tiered private content rather than the "funded backlog" mechanic highlighted in the announcement blog post, which I think is a good choice.
I think that you can now act as a merchant of record is overall the biggest deal for me. The shaky legal situation of Github Sponsors once you offer rewards was always the show-stopper for not signing up with Github Sponsors for me. In case I pick up some significant open-source work again, I'll likely sign up with you! :)
P.S.: You have to do double-newlines if you want your list to render correctly.
I see these tutorial videos where it zooms in out to the cursor relatively often and I find them really dizzying/distracting, am I alone with that or what do others think about this?
In the right hands the zooming effect could reduce disorientation due to "Doorway Effect", but in the wrong hands zooming animations may induce motion sickness in some people.
We need to start creating guidelines for 3D and/or animated UI/DOCs now, the "tyranny of the default" will make reactionary efforts ineffective after the fact.
Also, as someone who has navigated the "how to pay taxes as a crowd-funded OSS developer" swamp myself, I'm super happy to see Polar take on the task of becoming a Merchant of Record and abstracting away much of the complexity for all developers. :)
I’ve enabled Polar on one single repo, and the creator of an issue donated 100USD if it was closed. Today I was paid from Stripe.
I would even be happy to fund the work done in a fork until the maintainers decide or not to accept the PR. Whether the PR gets merged upstream is sometimes a secondary concern. The bounty for this work in a fork should still be advertised by community in upstream repo though (inside an issue ticket etc)
Agree. I love our issue funding feature (now with contributor rewards too), but it was always part of a larger suite of funding tools we wanted to offer & now can. Getting recurring funding/income (subscriptions) is definitely crucial.
Yes, completely agree re: merchant of record. I've chatted with hundreds of open source maintainers and this has been a big pain point & concern for many. So we wanted to address it. As a platform, we can work with tax professionals & lawyers to help solve this once vs. N times for each maintainer standalone (an impossible burden).
Every time I feel like donating to something I get pushed into a subscription and I end up donating... zero.
Last one was Mozilla. Please make it recurring! Please make it recurring! No thank you.
As far as I can tell you can still contribute financially via Polar.sh without having to subscribe.