Polar has no fixed, monthly, fees. We only earn when you do by taking a 5% revenue share of successful payments.
Stripe transaction- and payout fees apply in addition. We're covering this up until March 31st, 2024.
Yes, backers can fund any issue on GitHub by:
polar.new and entering a link to an existing issuegithub.com with polar.sh in the GitHub issue URLFund on the Polar badge embedded within the issue by the maintainerMost backers discover & fund issues via #3 which is proactively approved & promoted by you. Options #1-2 exist to make additional funding frictionless and offer inbound signals from your community. However, it's completely up to you as a maintainer whether you accept & want to promote additional funding towards those issues.
A beautiful, subtle and automatically generated SVG promoting funding for an issue at the bottom of its' description. Checkout a live example.
You can customize:
You don't have to do it manually. Polar makes it seamless for you as a maintainer.
Signup to Polar as a maintainer to:
Fund)You can then easily embed badges across issues in one of the following ways:
Fund and
Polar we'll shortly thereafter embed the badge.This updates the issue and thereby the modified_at timestamp of it on GitHub. However, default sorting on GitHub is by created_at so it's unaffected. We also update issues in reverse chronological order if you badge all historic issues at once. Thereby retaining the same sorting even with updated modified_at timestamps.
Below are all of our recommendations, but they're all optional. You know your community best and what works for you.
FUNDING.yml to promote it underneath "Sponsor this
project" on GitHub.Funding (Paid upfront): Backers pay immediately and funds are held by Polar. Once the issue is completed and no disputes are made, funds are transferred to you.
Pledges (Paid on completion): Backers opt to pay using invoice once the issue has been completed. We require such backers to have a connected GitHub account for social validation & review by you.
Of course, pledges are less of a gurantee. Yet, they are often preferred for larger amounts & by companies, and can offer higher conversion. We clearly distinguish them in your Polar dashboard so you can review them easily in terms of trustworthiness.
Yes, after 6 months backers are eligible to request the funds to be distributed elsewhere using Polar.
No. Uncompleted issues will eventually lead to expiration of the funding.
No. Our Terms of Service is written to ensure backers have no additional claims or rights beyond what your current license provides. Fairly enough, this goes both ways, i.e you're not allowed to promote funding for an issue only to release it under a different license - unless backers are granted permission to such a license.
Currently, in our alpha we have not automated management of this scenario since it has not been requested yet. We will once it becomes requested and in the meantime you can:
Yes and seamlessly so. We call it Rewards. Read more about Rewards here.
Once an issue is closed you'll be promoted to mark it as completed within Polar. Triggering notifications to backers and invoices for those who made pledges.
Simultaneously, you'll then be asked to specify contributors you want to share the funding with and their corresponding amount (%). We automatically suggest users who have made a PR referencing the issue and an even split across all parties (easy to adjust).
Finally, in case you're seeking to reward contributors, we'll prompt you to notify them in a comment on the issue. We'll automatically generate a suggested comment you can review & post easily from our dashboard as part of this process.
We'll attempt to notify them otherwise. However, we think you deserve the credit & opportunity to do so first.
Yes. You can set an upfront split (100%) to contributors and promote it within the Polar badge & page. You can also easily self-fund it. Together, that's all that is required to create a traditional bounty paid by you.
With the added benefit of other community members being able to pool capital behind it as well.
However, unlike traditional bounty solutions, we don't currently maintain a public directory of such rewards/bounties. Since such directories have historically attracted the wrong incentives, poor contributions and added overhead. Instead of rewarding your community. Read more about this design choice.
No. Read more here on why this is and our thinking behind it.
Checkout our Payout documentation for full details on this topic.
Once an issue is closed on GitHub we are notified almost instantly (webhooks). However, the next step is for backers to be notified, review and pay any outstanding invoice (pledges).
To prevent such notifications & actions happening prematurely and by mistake, e.g bots closing "stale" issues etc, we prompt you to explicitly mark it as completed. This step also includes additional actions, e.g setting up rewards proactively to contributors (if desired).
Yes. You can connect an Open Collective account instead of Stripe. However, such transfers are made manually by Polar. We do them on a monthly basis and only when funds exceed $100 to any given account.
Yes. Our long-term goal is to expand to other platforms too, but we'll remain focused on GitHub exclusively until we've had sufficient impact there.
Interested in GitLab support? Upvote the feature request
Interested in others? Submit a feature request
Today, we only support funding in USD and show it in USD across our entire product.
However, once we transfer the funds to your connected Stripe Express account, Stripe will convert it into the applicable currency of the account.
Polar is built on Stripe Connect and currently supports the following list of countries: