Birk Jernström

Polar - An open source monetization platform for developers

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.

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Birk Jernström
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 💪🏼
Sadi
@birk Are there options for Metered subscriptions?
François Voron
@birk @hellosadi Hey, software engineer at Polar here! Not yet, but that's on our roadmap 🙂
Birk Jernström
@andreea_staicu Thank you so much Andreea! 🙏🏼
Birk Jernström
@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...
Robleh Jama
@birk Congrats on the launch Birk, Petter and team!!
AuroraW
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.
Birk Jernström
@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 :)
Carl-Gerhard Lindesvärd
Looking forward to our meeting to plan how to integrate Polar.sh with OP! Polar seems to be the next big thing for OSS!
Piotr Kulpiński
@lindesvard What?! How would that integration work. Now you got me curious 😅
Birk Jernström
@lindesvard Me too! Excited to soon meet in person and explore what Polar & OP can do together.
Birk Jernström
@lindesvard @piotrkulpinski Can't spoil all secrets on launch day 🙊
Asher Dorian Thorne
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.
Birk Jernström
@asherdorianthorne Thank you so much for the kind words - really appreciate it! Yes, I hope Polar can help open source maintainers get more funding for their work. By experiment with more funding options and premium value-adds, and for Polar to make all of that easier for them.
Christoph Nakazawa
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.
François Voron
@cpojer Thank you for trusting us 🙏
Birk Jernström
@cpojer We're so stoked to have Athena Crisis on the platform - such a wonderful game! You've been a dream to work with too and I've really appreciated the countless feedback messages you've sent me. It's clear you obsess over details and it's really motivating building a product used by someone who cares about their craft that much ♥️
AsleMammad
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.
François Voron
@aslemammad Thank you for what you're doing, pkg.pr.new is such a game changer 💪
Birk Jernström
@aslemammad @fvoron +1 on what Francois said. Mohammad you're one of the most inspiring young open source developers I've met. It's been an honour getting to know you and play a small role in helping you get more funding behind awesome, thoughtful and genuine OSS contributions. Chatting with you, I always feel the future is bright for OSS.
AsleMammad
@fvoron @birk Thank you two for the kind words! I'll make sure to build more and get more funds on polar! It's just way too handy, and useful for my upcoming products in the future 👀
Marc Seitz
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.
Birk Jernström
@mfts0 Thank you so much Marc - that means the world coming from you! So impressed with how you're building Papermark in public & open source. The sentence "an open source merchant of record" gave me goosebumps.
Ryosuke Suzuki
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 ❤️‍🔥
Birk Jernström
@ryosuke_suzuki Thank you and appreciate the support 🖤🖤🖤
Ramunas Laucius
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!
Birk Jernström
@rmnslcs Wow that is incredible to hear! I would absolutely love to chat and figure out how we can help. Feel free to join our Discord or to DM me on Twitter if you'd prefer. https://dub.sh/polar-discord
Steven Tey
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!
Birk Jernström
@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!
Muhammad Salman
Wow its a great idea for opensource developers to get paid. appreciate the work.
Birk Jernström
@muhammad_salman39 Thank you Muhammad!
Ali Eskandari
Know many devs who struggle with monetising their coding and projects, this gonna make it super easy for them to set up payment process for their contributions. I'll tell my friend to check this out. Congrats on the launch 🤠
Birk Jernström
@ali_eskandari Thank you Ali! Yes, unfortunately too many to count. It's definitely a really hard problem, but my hypothesis is that experimentation + gradual expansion of monetization efforts is key. So with Polar, I hope we can build the platform that makes it easy to experiment and add funding + monetization layers over time as you grow. Tell your friends to join our Discord. I'd love to chat with them and help them with their experimentation. It's the best way for us to learn too on what our platform should help automate.
Pontus Abrahamsson
Polar is an amazing product and truly helps the open-source community! Thank you for building this 🖤
Birk Jernström
@pontusab Honoured to soon be a helpful part of v1.run 🖤🖤🖤
Omar McPizza 🍕
Have followed @birk and the team for almost a year now Polar is an epic way to fund OS projects - making OS more sustainable super happy to be a supporter 👏
Birk Jernström
@mcpizza0 Thank you Omar - it means a ton! Really grateful to you and your contributions to OSS & COSS - creating a Discord forum for founders that I'm thrilled to be a part of.
David Fernández
As a developer, I really appreciate a product like this. Thank you very much for making it real ❤️ Congratulations on the launch, I wish this project all the best
Birk Jernström
@dfodev Glad to hear that David! Would love to see you join our Discord and chat about how we can help you monetize. + Get feedback along the way of the things we can improve for you.
BekahHW
Creating a more sustainable open source ecosystem is important work. Kudos to the Polar team on your launch.
Birk Jernström
@bekahhw Thank you Bekah and couldn't agree more so thank you for everything you're doing over at OpenSauced ♥️
Ellie Huxtable
This is so exciting! I love what you've been building and it keeps getting better - super important work 👏
Birk Jernström
Thank you @ellie_huxtable! That means a ton coming from you. Absolutely love Atuin and what you're building - hoping we can play a small part in the Atuin success one day ♥️
Richard Song
Kudos to the entire Polar team on this fantastic launch! The built-in product and subscription benefits are a game-changer for developers. @birk, are there any plans to introduce analytics tools to help developers track their revenue and engagement metrics more effectively?
François Voron
@birk @renchu_song Hey, software engineer at Polar here 👋 We already have a metrics dashboard like this ➡️ Glad to have feedback about how to improve it and make it more useful for our users 🙂
Haider Aftab
@birk your product is amazing. I'm really impressed with the features and the ease of use. Keep up the great work! did polar offer bank account payount
Birk Jernström
@haider_aftab Thank you Haider! Glad to hear you like the product and found it easy to use! No, we currently don't I'm afraid. I've gone ahead and created a GitHub discussion for this. Please go ahead and subscribe or chime in to stay tuned as we develop it in the future. https://github.com/orgs/polarsou...
Mr. Ånand
Congrats on the launch🎉 Looking forward to impact Polar will create for OS community. I'm going to suggest Polar to one of the founder building in opensource, right away :)
Birk Jernström
@astrodevil That's awesome. Would love to help support however we can. Join our Discord and we can help them get launched + monetize and iterate based on their feedback and needs. https://dub.sh/polar-discord