Polar Has a Free API: Add Subscriptions and Donations to Your Open-Source Project in 10 Minutes

You built an open-source tool that thousands of developers use. Your GitHub repo has 2,000 stars. But your "Buy Me a Coffee" button generated $12 last year. The problem isn't that people don't want to support you — it's that existing monetization tools weren't built for developers. Polar was. What Polar Actually Does Polar is an open-source billing and monetization platform built specifically for developers and open-source maintainers. Think Stripe plus GitHub Sponsors, but with a developer-first API and features designed around how OSS projects actually work: issue funding, subscriptions, one-time donations, and digital product sales. Polar is fully open-source (Apache 2.0) and can be self-hosted. Their hosted platform at polar.sh has no monthly fee — they take a small percentage of transactions only when you earn. The REST API is clean, well-documented, and secured with OAuth2 or API keys. The critical difference from Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee: Polar integrates deeply with GitHub. Y