Hey everyone,
My name is Birk and I’ve started Polar.sh – a platform built for maintainers to get more funding. Starting with sponsorship behind upcoming efforts, i.e features, issues and soon milestones. Combined with tooling for individuals and companies to see which such efforts they link to within their own repositories and be able to easily fund & track them.
We’re building it open source (Apache 2.0) ourselves: GitHub - polarsource/polar: Polar is a platform for open source maintainers to get better funding
Our goal before year end is to build “Sponsorship 2.0”:
- Better insights & management of sponsors/backers
- Membership subscriptions for “voting” on features and milestones
- Updates, newsletters & polls. Create content with tooling designed for open source, e.g embed changelog, issues, milestones and more. Share it with your subscribers and convert more into backers with premium content, polls, videos and more. Sort of like Substack, but for open source, and…
- You can integrate this content and functionality on your sites/domains using our API/SDKs.
More information incl. rough sketches can be found here: v0.5 Roadmap: OSS Sponsorship 2.0 · Issue #897 · polarsource/polar · GitHub
In short, we’re building a platform for maintainers beyond the code itself to help manage, grow and leverage their audience and convert more into backers. Combined with offering additional services and subscriptions seamlessly and without manual overhead. Lots to build ahead and wanted to share it to get your input and feedback if there is anything we’re missing or that would be helpful to you and your initiatives. 