[birk]

Hey HN,

Birk from Polar here. We're building a platform for open source developers offering better funding & community tools. We're building it open source too: https://github.com/polarsource/polar

Here to answer any questions you might have. You can read more about this on our own Polar page for Polar: https://polar.sh/polarsource/posts/github-supports-polar-in-...

[myaccountonhn]

Hey! More funding options for open source is incredible.

Have you thought about opening up the platform to more than just Github? Having Github be the sole source for all open source projects is not very healthy for the ecosystem. There are other platforms like Codeberg and Sourcehut.

[birk]

Yes, supporting more platforms is definitely something I see as part of our mission and long-term development. Started with GitHub since it's where most open source initiatives are hosted + analysis on large registries, e.g npm, pypi, confirmed that almost all of them where.

We're big fans of other platforms and looking forward to expand our support. But main focus now is helping open source developers on GitHub get meaningfully more funding & helping more than a few work on it full-time to even start small businesses. Once we've achieved that & proved our product can make a big difference, it's time to expand.

[jahsome]

I understand and agree with the sentiment, but "why only GitHub?" comments are practically at the top of every similar HN thread. There's certainly no harm in asking.

The question strikes me as naive though, akin to asking "have you thought about using precious capital and momentum on .00001% (clearly exaggerated) of the DVCS market?"

The sad truth is "healthy for the ecosystem" isn't really profitable. I'm sure supporting other platforms is harmless in a roadmap/backlog, but seems like wasted effort early on in a company's development to split their focus.

[Tmpod]

First of all, congratulations on building another option for OSS funding!

Now onto the questions:

How does Polar compare to other open-centric platforms, such as OpenCollective?

The latter has some great transparency features, are you planning on implementing anything like that?

Thank you!

[vault]

Cool to see it's open source! I don't have time right now to go through the codebase, so hope you don't mind if I ask you instead. What are you using "Act on your behalf" GitHub permission for?

[wahnfrieden]

Often I want to fund a PR in someone else’s project. Please don’t only make tools available to repo owners. Let us crowd fund work without the maintainers taking the lead. Sometimes the maintainers don’t have time or will to coordinate that, even if they will take the effort to click the merge button on PRs.

[jraph]

Such a thing needs to be carefully designed.

It can lead to difficult situations for maintainers, where they were not willing to accept some work and didn't have the chance to express this (yet) (lack of time for instance), and now they have a work that somebody else paid for but didn't really want to accept but rejecting it could be harder, emotionally. So you would need at least an okay from them.

[okhuman]

Woah impressive - thanks for building this platform, I see the possibilities of it.

In terms of fees its polar.sh at 5% + stripe connect at x (us region)? What's roughly the stripe fee expected?

[ChrisArchitect]

One week from community suggestions to production? Pretty good!

[cowfish]

Are you planning to add support for non-Western countries?

[birk]

We're building on Stripe Connect with the following countries supported for payouts today: https://docs.polar.sh/faq/maintainers/#which-countries-are-s...

Will expand as we can with Stripe. Long-term, in order to expand truly world-wide, I think we'll need to integrate support for other payment providers too. Definitely something we want. Just a question of short-term capabilities & main priority being to reach a v1 that truly makes a dent in open source funding. Expanding markets, platforms and more once we have.

[mholt]

Congrats on this milestone!

Love to see more ways to keep open source sustainable. Thanks for the work you do. Hopefully Polar is very successful!