Polar - An open source monetization platform for developers

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 💪🏼

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.

Looking forward to our meeting to plan how to integrate Polar.sh with OP! Polar seems to be the next big thing for OSS!

Sounds like a really useful platform for devs! Just checked it out, and it looks promising. Love the focus on helping open source developers get paid. Congrats on the launch.

I've been using Polar to fund open source contributions for [Athena Crisis](https://athenacrisis.com/open-so...) and it's been frictionless and fast. The 1.0 release looks awesome. I hope that long-term it can make more open source projects sustainable.

Polar helped me get to $100 subscriptions in nearly 3 days or something like that! Something I never experienced as an open source developer. Plus, they're agile and fast, so let's use Polar.

Congrats on the launch, @birk and Polar team. Amazing path to becoming the first open source merchant of record. There are so many small things that we as open source developers need to manage outside our codebase, like license keys and I’m psyched that Polar is making our lives easier.

The OSS community thrives on goodwill and contributions, pushing tech forward. But without support or funding, maintaining these projects is tough. That’s why I’m so grateful for Polar—it tackles the money problem, making OSS sustainable for devs. Thank you, Polar, for empowering creators to keep doing what they love. Keep going ❤️‍🔥

Huge congratulations to the team, followed Polar for nearly a year now ever since I saw Emil's amazing first drafts on twitter. Kudos for building for indies and open source maintainers, part of developers' ecosystem that was always very hard to monetize. I'm now considering switching my side project (data-analysis tool) to open source and build a community around it instead of monetizing the standard ways! Great work guys, you make the world a better place!

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!