Help Keep Polar Open Source

Please donate to support keeping Polar Open Source.

Click here if you'd like to donate:

opencollective.com/polar-bookshelf

If you'd like to read our full roadmap click here:

getpolarized.io/2019/04/10/Roadmap-Q2-Q3-2019.html

Help Keep Polar Open Source

I'm Kevin Burton, the creator of Polar and I need your help.

I’ll touch upon this in a minute but Polar is something I’ve been thinking about for a decade.

Simply put - I want to reboot the Internet and take it to a time when data and knowledge was shared more freely.

Polar is the platform I’m building to enable this vision.

I see Polar as another layer on top of the existing Internet which includes easy content sharing, annotations, and archival.

To that end I’m starting a crowdfunding campaign to keep Polar open source and really put the project into overdrive - and I need your support.

The Plan

Here’s the plan.

First we’re going to raise twenty five thousand dollars from our current user base over the next month.

We polled our users and asked them what they would be willing do donate and the average was twenty seven dollars, and of course we have thousands of users - so I think this is a reasonable goal.
Now of course, if you’d like do donate more than $27 don’t let me stop you.

We’re also going to allow donors to convert their donations to Polar Premium.

There's a link below to the crowdfunding campaign and also one directly in Polar when you're ready to donate.

Once we've raised this initial round, we're then going to use that momentum to raise $150k from the Internet as a whole.

Possibly through a system like Kickstarter or Indiegogo but we’re still investigating our options.

This should get us through the next 6-9 months and allow us apply for grants to continue supporting development over the long term.

The grant application process itself can take 3-6 months but the funding could be much larger and allow us to build something really special.

How Your Support Will Help Polar

The money will help us improve usability, reliability and focus on feature requests from our user base.

Additionally, we’re planning on adding mobile support including iOS and Android and improving our user interface (including a dark mode).

We’re also going to implement a new viewer to support most popular document formats including ePub and Mobi.

Most importantly we’re going to focus on team sharing and collaboration. These are two major features of Polar we haven’t shipped yet but they’re the ones I’m most excited about.

There’s a lot under the surface of Polar that you haven’t seen yet. Mostly architectural work but I think we’re really close to something amazing.

I've included links below to our roadmap if you're interested in exactly what we’d like to accomplish..

The long term goal is to have Polar financially self sufficient but in order to get there we need more time to expand our initial user base.

Freemium Model

Polar will be funded by a freemium model with 95% of users using Polar for free.

More importantly, I want to continue to keep Polar Open Source.

I think it's vital that a tool that holds your personal knowledge repository is built on a foundation that you can trust isn't going to simply vanish.

Polar’s primary funding long term will be supported by sales of Polar premium.

We will always support using Polar as Open Source and users can build from source code directly.

We’re will also have free versions of Polar which will be very easy to install and without annoying ads or nagging you to constantly upgrade.

Premium Versions

The premium versions of Polar designed to be very affordable - $4.99 per month - about the price of a cup of coffee.

If we haven't generated enough value for you that you wouldn't buy me a cup of coffee I think we're doing something wrong.

I've included a rough feature breakdown so you can see what features we intend on charging for at each level.

The funds we raise will primarily be used to allow me to concentrate on Polar but also bring in additional developers who are more skilled in specific areas including UI, design and React development.

Polar is Important

Polar is an important project for me.

I’m very passionate about open content and open source and have devoted the last 20 years of my life to fighting for the open web.

I was one of the inventors of RSS and podcasting and helped create many projects within the Apache Software Foundation including Apache Maven.

This is an uphill battle - but we’re in this together.

Thanks for all your support.