That looks like quite an impressive output in that time!
It appears that there is now more of focus on subscriptions with tiered private content rather than the "funded backlog" mechanic highlighted in the announcement blog post, which I think is a good choice.
I think that you can now act as a merchant of record is overall the biggest deal for me. The shaky legal situation of Github Sponsors once you offer rewards was always the show-stopper for not signing up with Github Sponsors for me. In case I pick up some significant open-source work again, I'll likely sign up with you! :)
P.S.: You have to do double-newlines if you want your list to render correctly.
Thank you! Yes, we've shipped most of the features mentioned as aspirations in that original post now. We'll soon share an updated one on the big goals for 2024 :)
Agree. I love our issue funding feature (now with contributor rewards too), but it was always part of a larger suite of funding tools we wanted to offer & now can. Getting recurring funding/income (subscriptions) is definitely crucial.
Yes, completely agree re: merchant of record. I've chatted with hundreds of open source maintainers and this has been a big pain point & concern for many. So we wanted to address it. As a platform, we can work with tax professionals & lawyers to help solve this once vs. N times for each maintainer standalone (an impossible burden).
I think seeing it as Patreon for open source is fine, as Patreon's offering is quite ill-suited for OSS (e.g. bad/abandoned API), leaving a lot of room in that niche.
As far as I can tell you can still contribute financially via Polar.sh without having to subscribe.
- Posts & newsletter support to build direct relationship with your community
- Subscriptions to offer sustainable & recurring funding
- Built-in subscription benefits: Premium posts, Discord invites, Automate sponsor logos in README/site/docs, access to private GitHub repo(s)
- Rewards: Split issue funding with contributors
- Merchant of record & handling VAT for the above
- Public API
We've also lowered our pricing to 5%.