Ship it and sell it

Happy Friday! In today’s digest, I’m covering a new tool that makes it easier for developers to earn money from their side projects. But before that, and for the last time this week…

Here’s the headlines:

🇪🇺 Elon Musk’s X could face sanctions in the EU over Grok.

🔐 Telegram will start moderating private chats after the CEO’s arrest.

🧼 Microsoft has launched a new tool to scrub deepfake porn from the internet.

Over the past year, the tech landscape for developers has been anything but stable. Layoffs have become a familiar story, and AI tools are getting better at tasks traditionally done by developers. In the midst of this uncertainty, more developers are looking for ways to stay independent and keep creating and shipping projects on their own terms.

This is where Polar comes in. It’s an open-source monetization platform designed for developers who want to offer their work directly to their audience—whether through crowdfunding, memberships, digital products, or SaaS. Polar has spent over a year in development, and today, the team is launching Polar v1.0, offering a simple, developer-friendly alternative to other monetization platforms like Lemon Squeezy.

What makes Polar stand out? For one, it’s built with developers in mind. From handling the hard stuff like billing, sales tax, and EU VAT to offering features like file downloads, license keys, and even Discord invites—it takes care of the infrastructure so developers can focus on building. The platform also integrates with APIs, Webhooks, OAuth, and SDKs, making it highly customizable.

For developers navigating an uncertain industry, tools like Polar offer a way to keep shipping their work independently. It’s trusted by thousands of developers and is now an official GitHub funding option, showing there’s still a way forward for those looking to stay in control of their projects.

Product Hunt and Solaris AI are back with another demo night, right here in San Francisco. This time around the theme of LLM observability, Join us on September 9th at 6.30 pm PT at the Solaris AI offices for a night of amazing demos, food, drink, and networking. 

PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS

Redline is a Mac application that keeps a to-do list in your menu bar. It’s focused on doing instead of planning. It is always visible and respects your attention.

The Today App is a personal task management app that is squarely focused on the day at hand. It helps you get through your to-do list and comes with habit tracking.

AI TOOLS

Indigo is an AI sidekick that lets you save all of your best and most important AI prompts into a custom command library and use them across any app that needs them.

AI Blaze is an AI copilot that lets you create your own AI prompt templates for any situation and use them on any page to improve writing or text.