Readit Newsbirk commented on GitHub now officially supports polar.sh as a funding platform twitter.com/birk/status/1... · Posted by u/zegl
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).
birk commented on GitHub now officially supports polar.sh as a funding platform twitter.com/birk/status/1... · Posted by u/zegl
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
birk commented on GitHub now officially supports polar.sh as a funding platform twitter.com/birk/status/1... · Posted by u/zegl
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.
birk commented on GitHub now officially supports polar.sh as a funding platform twitter.com/birk/status/1... · Posted by u/zegl
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.
birk commented on GitHub now officially supports polar.sh as a funding platform twitter.com/birk/status/1... · Posted by u/zegl
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%.
birk commented on GitHub now officially supports polar.sh as a funding platform twitter.com/birk/status/1... · Posted by u/zegl
birk commented on GitHub now officially supports polar.sh as a funding platform twitter.com/birk/status/1... · Posted by u/zegl
Hey 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-...
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. :)