An open source alternative to Lemon Squeezy with better pricing. Built for developers to offer crowdfunding, memberships, digital products and SaaS within minutes. Stay focused on shipping your passion - leave upsales, billing and international taxes to us.Dear builders,
After over a year of building Polar, we’re thrilled to launch v1.0 on Product Hunt today 🎉
We started Polar with the mission of getting open source developers paid. By building a fully open source (GitHub) funding & monetization platform designed for them. Today, Polar is trusted by thousands of developers and is an official GitHub funding option.
However, as we’ve been building, countless developers have been laid off all over the world, and an endless list of AI startups are emerging with the promise of replacing even more developers. Painting a grim picture of the future for developers.
We wanted to build towards a different future.
A future of developers thriving independently. Shipping more open source, solo products and indie startups. Getting paid to code on their passions.
So for our v1.0, we’ve expanded to focus on all developers who seek to ship independent software - builders, indie hackers and open source maintainers alike.
Polar v1.0 now offers:
- Donations, crowdfunding, memberships, digital products and SaaS
- Built-in product and subscription benefits. From license keys, file downloads, private GitHub repository access, Discord invites, and more.
- Powerful custom integrations using our API, Webhooks, OAuth & SDKs
- Powered by Polar as the Merchant of Record - handling sales tax & EU VAT
So you can focus on building your passion. We’ll focus on the infrastructure to get you paid.
We really hope you like the product & appreciate the support today 🙏🏼
But more importantly, we’d love to hear your feedback and how we can better serve you. Let’s build the best monetization platform for developers, together 💪🏼@birk Are there options for Metered subscriptions?@birk @hellosadi Hey, software engineer at Polar here! Not yet, but that's on our roadmap 🙂@andreea_staicu Thank you so much Andreea! 🙏🏼@hellosadi @fvoron It's in our backlog, but adding it to our GitHub discussions too so you can subscribe, chime in and follow along. But definitely something we want to support in the near future.
https://github.com/orgs/polarsou...@birk Congrats on the launch Birk, Petter and team!!Congrats on the launch. So inspiring to see a platform dedicated to supporting developers and fostering independence in the open-source community. Looking forward to seeing the impact of Polar and wishing you all the best as you continue to build and improve.@auroraw Wow, thank you so much for those kind words! Yes, it's a mission that deeply resonates with our team and keeps us going throughout all the challenges of which there are many. Focusing on helping open source & indie developers reach for sustainability & independence is not easy, but certainly worthwhile and I'm convinced it's the future. So we keep building towards it :)Fantastic! Polar makes open source more sustainable, and open source makes the world a better place! Congrats on the launch! BTW, I am very curious about what inspired you to have this idea?That's got to be one of the best product launch videos I've ever seen – congrats on the launch! Have been a big fan of Polar for a while now, excited to see it keep growing!@steventey That makes me so happy to hear. Obviously I'm biased + it's hard to know if you've been staring at something for too long. But I love our video and get really excited watching it. Glad it's shared even outside the team 😅
Humbled to get such high praise for an incredible crafter like yourself Steven!
