GitHub now officially supports polar.sh as a funding platform
twitter.comHey HN,
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-...
Hey! More funding options for open source is incredible.
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.
Yes, supporting more platforms is definitely something I see as part of our mission and long-term development. Started with GitHub since it's where most open source initiatives are hosted + analysis on large registries, e.g npm, pypi, confirmed that almost all of them where.
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.
I understand and agree with the sentiment, but "why only GitHub?" comments are practically at the top of every similar HN thread. There's certainly no harm in asking.
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.
If we don't fight this concentration of power, we're doomed to a Microsoft future. You might make good profit for a few quarters on the way there, but "not healthy for the ecosystem" is a gross euphemism for what's at the end of that road.
I'm not sure I agree, and as a rule of thumb don't really see much value in the arguments of those who seemingly can predict the future, especially when spreading FUD is the primary mechanism for supporting their prediction.
First of all, congratulations on building another option for OSS funding!
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!
Cool to see it's open source! I don't have time right now to go through the codebase, so hope you don't mind if I ask you instead. What are you using "Act on your behalf" GitHub permission for?
Often I want to fund a PR in someone else’s project. Please don’t only make tools available to repo owners. Let us crowd fund work without the maintainers taking the lead. Sometimes the maintainers don’t have time or will to coordinate that, even if they will take the effort to click the merge button on PRs.
Such a thing needs to be carefully designed.
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.
I know those things must be accounted for. However I believe there’s a strong opportunity there. Many projects will accept PRs and merge them, but not take much lead on the project and soliciting particular contributions top-down, or promoting community requests into top down calls to action. And they already field PRs from people paid to produce them (a lot of open source contribution happens on company time)
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)
Woah impressive - thanks for building this platform, I see the possibilities of it.
In terms of fees its polar.sh at 5% + stripe connect at x (us region)? What's roughly the stripe fee expected?
One week from community suggestions to production? Pretty good!
Are you planning to add support for non-Western countries?
We're building on Stripe Connect with the following countries supported for payouts today: https://docs.polar.sh/faq/maintainers/#which-countries-are-s...
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.
Congrats on this milestone!
Love to see more ways to keep open source sustainable. Thanks for the work you do. Hopefully Polar is very successful!
Previous discussion when they launched 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36722702
Just to help highlight some big updates since:
- 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%.
That looks like quite an impressive output in that time!
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.
Thank you! Yes, we've shipped most of the features mentioned as aspirations in that original post now. We'll soon share an updated one on the big goals for 2024 :)
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).
So it's another Patreon but for open source exclusively?
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.
I think seeing it as Patreon for open source is fine, as Patreon's offering is quite ill-suited for OSS (e.g. bad/abandoned API), leaving a lot of room in that niche.
As far as I can tell you can still contribute financially via Polar.sh without having to subscribe.
(kind of offtopic)
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?
It IS distracting, and a waste of time vs Jump-cut-to-results.
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.
I concur that the style doesn't appeal to me, but I figure it's ne of those marketing things like over-the-top thumbnails that no one likes but statistically works. FWIW, the XFCE desktop lets you zoom in on your cursor with integer scaling and /i love it/, legit use that as a magnifying glass (even to show people things) all the time-- but it /feels/ very different. The thing is okay, it's the style that feels patronizing.
That's great! We've been using Polar for funding GitHub issues in the SerenityOS & Ladybird projects for a couple months now, and it always makes me super happy when I see someone collect a reward!
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. :)
So proud to have SerenityOS & Ladybird onboard Polar. You're such an inspiration and the community is incredible with talented & kind developers uniting to build something many deem impossible to begin with. Thanks for showing that those are the ambitions we should pursue.
I like that polar supports funding specific issues or pull requests. Seems like a nice way to help fund a project while also helping prioritize issues you care about.
Thank you! Important callout: We designed issue funding for maintainers & contributors vs. bounty hunters. We don't believe in traditional bounties. More on this here: https://polar.sh/polarsource/posts/introducing-rewards
Polar is Onlyfans for devs?
With less feet pics.
There were many negative news about another funding platform that basically took the money and ran away[1]. I am curious how Polar would be able to avoid that fate.
I'm curious what the main differences are compared to all the other platforms
Jumped to the comment section for this as well. Any open source devs successfully fund their projects through similar services that can give input on polar.sh and its competitors?
I’ve done open source for ~4 years, and got my first(and only) subscriber on GitHub a few months ago.
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.
One downside is that they operate only in a few countries. Wealthy countries, too. So like GitHub sponsors it’s available in countries that need it least.
How can I create a polar account for a GitHub org instead of only a single user?
Still too many jumps to funnel money to the devs. Github needs to be shaken up.
Congratulations!
Thank you! :)