Polar v1.0: Let’s Fix Open Source Funding

Curious what you think about subscriptions versus one-time payments. Seems like Polar is going more for the latter. Would love if this was normalized and could see it leading to more money coming in overall. My concern is that subscriptions are great for predictability (company sponsors $500/mo) and without that I need to find a way to re-acquire money to pay rent every month.

Intent here is not for each commit across all of OSS to be paid for. Or that every maintainer has to charge for add-on services.

Polar is designed for maintainers who either 1) spend an enormous amount of time in effectively unpaid support already or 2) want tooling to run an independent business around their OSS initiatives.

It’s not designed for everyone and you opt-in to use it (as maintainers, contributors or backers).

To me that’s the core trait of OSS: Freedom. Today, I don’t think maintainers have that freedom to easily pursue an independent business or get paid for support towards businesses without an insane amount of unnecessary overhead. That’s what we aim to change for those who seek it.

I think enshittification is more a consequence of either 1) current metrics not matching costs 2) loss of long-term vision of further innovation (often once it's no longer founder led) 3) no competition.

It's either an attempt to make up for the bleeding short-term (1), unclear path of expansion (2) or an excessive ability to maximize costs due to no alternatives on the market (3).

In many ways, I'd argue VCs decrease the risk of enshittification or delay it. They're comfortable funding the delta between current metrics vs. costs (1) – up to a point, of course. They also love to fund competition in proven markets (3).

> Incumbents [...] would simply pocket the bounties for issues that never got picked up. Is this a risk for yours too?

This is a combination of the problem not having been solved at scale and of such actors needing cash (1). At Polar now, we have runway for years even without $1 in revenue – thanks to VCs.

Of course, I understand what you mean and ultimately the problem in our industry arises when "the party stops". At some point current metrics & costs need to balance. However, I'd argue this is the responsibility of the founders. VCs will always be the voice of "invest in growth" because it's fundamentally what their capital is for. Founders need to know how to leverage it, track current metrics and obsess about how things are progressing to match up eventually and spend + invest accordingly. Combined with having a long-term mission & vision spanning beyond quarterly goals. Enshittification is duck tape for lacking these things and ultimately fuel for competition.

So to answer your question, I believe I'm to be held accountable and not VCs in case we enshittify the product. Having worked at Shopify, I'm inspired by their 100-year mission and being founder+product led and obsessed about merchants – knowing money comes as a reward and is not the pursuit. Having also started a company before, I've learned to "not get drunk" by the party.

We're building towards something new in the pursuit of creating an independent pathway towards careers and small businesses within OSS for those who want to pursue it. It will take time and it will cost a lot of money to make this bet. It would have been impossible without VCs and I've chosen really great ones who align with this mission. I'm beyond thankful for them making this possible because that's what it boils down to.

Finally, we're open source so you can hold us accountable :-) https://github.com/polarsource/polar