🎯 North Star & Current Milestones

[birkjernstrom]

Polar North Star

An open source alternative to Lemon Squeezy / Paddle. Built for developers by developers.

• All-in-one funding & monetization platform for developers to get paid coding on their passions.
• Supporting them and their upstreams from the first donation to IPO.
• No ceiling & free to cherry pick.
• We'll handle the boilerplate (billing, receipts, customer accounts) & headaches (sales tax, VAT - merchant of record) so developers can focus on building.

Product

• REST API & SDK. Our core product supporting all channels & integrations + future white labeling (long-term)
  • REST API (REST API Convention proposal #3237).
  • OAuth #2642
  • Webhooks #2641
  • Incredible API docs #3245
• Channels
  • ✅ GitHub. Embeds + funding.yaml support linking too 👇🏼
  • ✅ Polar page. Starting point before expanding 👇🏼
    • Polar Page v2 #3726
  • Starter Kits & Seamless integrations. NextJS, Nuxt, Electron, Swift.. Built for different monetization tactics, e.g courses, sponsorware, digital downloads, books etc. SDKs and starters kits to integrate Polar on your site/service.
    • NextJS Starter Kit #3246
• Polar Identity & Auth. Developers don’t need to manage VAT/Sales Tax or do Auth/Order/Receipt management. Just integrate “Polar Login” or license validation. Customers have access to their orders, receipts etc via our customer portal.
  • Login with Polar #3728
• Checkout
  • Customer Receipts #3730
  • Hosted & Embeddable Overlay Checkout #3248
  • 1% OSS Program #3247. Offer developers to specify Polar developers/initiatives to automatically donate x% to.
• Funding/Monetization Mechanisms
  • ✅ Donations
  • ✅ Issue Funding & Rewards
  • ✅ Subscriptions
  • Products (Pay once) #2638
  • Invoicing & Custom Agreements
• Pricing Models
  • ✅ Once
  • ✅ Recurring
  • Pricing: Pay what you want #3458
  • Usage Pricing #3733
• Built-in product & subscription benefits
  • ✅ Early/premium newsletter access
  • ✅ Discord
  • ✅ Newsletter ads (integrate in README/sites too)
  • ✅ Private GitHub Repo(s)
  • File downloads #2636
  • Benefit: License Keys #3459
  • Private packages (NPM, PyPi etc)
    • Benefit: Private NPM Package(s) #3732
  • Custom agreements & SLAs

Core principles

1. Boilerplate as a Service
   Customer login, checkout, billing, receipts, VAT, newsletters, common upsells (Discord, GitHub, License Keys) etc. Our business is making the boilerplate for digital businesses as a service so developers can focus on their unique product.

2. Gorgeous defaults & powerful integrations
   No advanced theme editor and template language for the Polar page/store. Offer a great default with basic settings and our API/SDK for completely custom integrations vs. anything in-between.

3. Nurture > Expand > New Markets/Models

   1. Focus on feature requests from existing customers.
   2. Expand with features that can increase their customer lifetime value, e.g more benefits (license keys)
   3. New pricing methods, currencies and markets.

Milestone v1.0: Core platform (Link)

Product Hunt & DevHunt 🎉 Still a mountain to climb and a ton to build, but the core platform is now in-place to iterate upon.

• Decouple Polar & GitHub Organizations #3249. Ability to setup Polar without mapping it 1:1 with a GitHub Organization. Enabling standalone offerings & future integrations with other platforms, e.g GitLab & more.
• API v2
  • REST API Convention proposal #3237
  • OAuth #2642
  • Webhooks #2641
  • Incredible API docs #3245
• NextJS Starter Kit #3246
• Products (Pay once) #2638
• File downloads #2636
• Website 2.0 #2647

Milestone v1.1: Customizations (Link)

Offer a centralized dashboard view for developers to customize Polar to better fit their business & integrations.

• Branding & Page Customization #3731
  • Polar Page v2 #3726
  • Hosted & Embeddable Overlay Checkout #3248
  • Login with Polar #3728
  • Customer Receipts #3730
• Test/Development Organization Mode  #3738

Milestone v1.2: Customer Management

Polar is happy to offer support to all buyers, but for a great & scalable experience for developers they need to be able to directly help their customers too.

• Customer Management #3734
• Preview & Resend Customer Receipts #3735