Polar v2.0: Focus & Changes ahead

[birkjernstrom]

We announced Polar v1.0 on September 5th - 12 days ago - and have been absolutely blown away by the reception:

• Thousands of new developers using Polar
• We trended on GitHub and received 1,000+ new stars
• Our announcement tweet was shared by hundreds, liked and bookmarked by thousands and we got 2,000 new followers
• #1 Product of the Day & #1 Developer Product of the Week on Product Hunt
• Countless encouraging messages, support-, feedback- and feature requests

It’s been incredible to see such strong community support. We feel pressure (in a good way) to really deliver beyond expectations towards our goal.

Becoming the best monetization platform for developers. How?

• Faster. Offer common membership-, product- and subscription benefits without having to code the boilerplate to deliver them. E.g License keys, File Downloads to Discord & GitHub access etc.
• Easier. Launch, iterate, manage and grow popular funding- and monetization offerings in minutes through our dashboard vs. code them yourself through low-level APIs.
• Scale independently. Leave international sales tax, billing and compliance to us.
• Community. From an official GitHub funding option, issue funding & rewards to Discord automations. We’re built to power developer communities.

Focus ahead

Last week, our team gathered to convert all learnings, feedback and feature requests into an updated backlog. Below are our high-level v2.0 priorities.

• Seamless integrations. Shipping and sponsoring open source SDKs, frameworks, starter kits etc - obsessing over the ease of integration.
• Our own billing engine. Diversifying from Stripe and offering our own checkout, invoices, receipts and customer portal - built with global PSPs for transparent and competitive pricing.
• Customizations. Ability to customize our checkout, receipts and customer portal.
• Customer management. Manage customer & community member benefits with ease.
• More payment & payout options. PayPal payments + payouts & bank payouts.
• More monetization tools. Usage based billing, per seat pricing & seat invites via customer portal.

That's the broad strokes. As always, we'll share our upcoming milestones as we build towards v2.0. You're also welcome to join our Discord if you want to be part in shaping the future 🙂

We have a lot to build and focus is key. So we’ve had to make some important decisions in regards to a few product features.

Changes ahead

Sunsetting Newsletters

Too few leverage our newsletter feature - our customers prefer to code vs. write. Amongst developers who do write newsletters, they prefer to use dedicated and exceptional products designed for it, e.g Ghost, Buttondown etc.

We believe it’s better we partner and support integrations with such products. So we can focus on building the best monetization engine to connect to them.

Timeline & Actions

• Coming days: We’ll turn it off for new signups and existing customers without any posts
• Coming weeks: We’ll reach out to customers with posts to offer exports and support migrating & redirecting them elsewhere
• Coming month(s): We’ll sunset it entirely once migrations are done

Donations -> Pay What You Want

Today, we shipped Pay What You Want (PWYW) as a pricing option for products 🎉 We’ll be sunsetting our separate Donations feature in favor of PWYW.

1. Supporting our built-in benefits to be leveraged as part of donations
2. More use cases beyond donations alone

Timeline & Actions

• Coming days: We’ll disable it for all new signups and existing customers without any donations
• Coming weeks: We’ll reach out to customers with historic donations and help them migrate over

Issue Funding

We intend to refactor Issue Funding (and streamline it) to be built on our core billing engine in the future, e.g:

• Badges create and leverage Pay What You Want (PWYW) products under the hood
• Pay on completion will leverage and automate Polar invoicing once we have it
• Rewards will be supported in the core vs. issue funding alone; split all income with contributors automatically or manually

We're really excited about the possibilities above. Until then, we consider it “done” as is except for maintenance, and in fact it has been in reality too for our community (no new feature requests). However, we will do three changes in the near future to streamline a future transition and reduce short-term operations:

1. Remove tracking of contributions (PRs, diff) - requires manual polling of the GitHub API and is the source of a lot of headache, maintenance and overhead for little to no value
2. Remove support for funding any issue without a badge - never been used
3. Require manual input of contributors to reward vs. suggestions. Same issue as above + error prone vs. explicit rewards.