Polar is Onlyfans for devs?
GitHub now officially supports polar.sh as a funding platform
21–30 of 43 posts
Re: GitHub now officially supports polar.sh as a funding platform
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
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.
Re: GitHub now officially supports polar.sh as a funding platform
#23I'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?
Re: GitHub now officially supports polar.sh as a funding platform
#24Hey 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-...
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?
Re: GitHub now officially supports polar.sh as a funding platform
#25Hey 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-...
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.
Re: GitHub now officially supports polar.sh as a funding platform
#26Hey 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-...
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.
Re: GitHub now officially supports polar.sh as a funding platform
#27That'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. :)
Re: GitHub now officially supports polar.sh as a funding platform
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Re: GitHub now officially supports polar.sh as a funding platform
#29Hey 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-...
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!
Re: GitHub now officially supports polar.sh as a funding platform
#30(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?
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.