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-...
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I would even be happy to fund the work done in a fork until the maintainers decide or not to accept the PR. Whether the PR gets merged upstream is sometimes a secondary concern. The bounty for this work in a fork should still be advertised by community in upstream repo though (inside an issue ticket etc)
In terms of fees its polar.sh at 5% + stripe connect at x (us region)? What's roughly the stripe fee expected?
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.
Love to see more ways to keep open source sustainable. Thanks for the work you do. Hopefully Polar is very successful!