Polar 2.0 Roadmap

[birkjernstrom]

Our high-level roadmap ahead. By no means all-inclusive or set in stone, but intended to capture the broad strokes of our planned efforts and their estimated sequencing based on:

1. Learnings, feedback & enhancements for existing features
2. Feature requests from our community
3. Our vision for Polar, e.g developers have Supabase, Vercel (and more) to build, ship and scale software, but what is the equivalent platform to run a business around the software as easily and developer centric? That's what we're about.

Treat this as a living document. We adapt quickly based on learnings and feature requests - don't hesitate to share yours to shape this future.

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Path to v2.0

tl;dr

• v1.5 Tasks: Customer Events, Usage Based Billing & Entitlements 2.0 (Beta - ETA May 1st)
• v1.6 Tasks: Alerts & Customer Forecasts (Usage Based 1.0)
• v1.7 Tasks: Seats & Quantities
• v1.8 Tasks: Subscription Trials+Durations & Polar Invoicing
• v1.9 Tasks: Currencies & Tax Inclusive Pricing
• v2.0 Tasks: Self-hosted Checkout & Customer Portal React Packages

v1.5: Customer Events, Usage Based Billing & Entitlements 2.0 (Beta - ETA May 1st)

Usage based billing is our number 1 feature request. At it's core, it's a function of how customers use your product and the understanding of which is key to gain insights, learnings and opportunities to grow your business and nurture customer relationships.

So we're going well beyond rigid meters with customer event ingestion to be used beyond billing. Leveraging them in our automated entitlements 2.0 vision to offer a wide array of open source packages to automate common upsales, e.g Slack Connect invites and more.

Ultimately, giving a birds-eye view of events related to customers and flexible meters to define on top to inform usage based billing.

v1.6 Alerts & Customer Forecasts (Usage Based 1.0)

Continued focus and expansion of v1.5 with custom alerts based on events and advanced customer forecasts & alerting thresholds based on meters they pay for. Combined with room for iterating & improving v1.5 based on feedback in the wild.

v1.7 Seats & Quantities

Our second most common feature request. We're going to go beyond a quantity amount on orders to connect it with our automated entitlements with easy APIs to allocate seats and consume entitlements to your customers for those seats, e.g grant individual license keys to seat holders and much more.

v1.8 Subscription Trials+Durations & Polar Invoicing

First-class support for subscription trials and more custom durations beyond monthly & annual subscriptions, e.g quarterly. By this stage, we should also be in a position where all billing logic has been moved in-house, e.g Stripe is used for the transactions only. Making it easy to integrate more PSPs and giving us complete control end-to-end of the customer experience throughout them all.

v1.9 Currencies & Tax Inclusive Pricing

Support more currencies beyond USD and offer tax inclusive pricing. Currently, ahead of our 2.0 we've chosen to stay focused on USD/English as it's the most common setup for digital sales, but definitely want to support many more currencies for future expansion & internationalization.

v2.0 Self-hosted Checkout & Customer Portal React Packages

Standalone React packages for our Checkout & Customer Portal components, i.e all end-customer facing surfaces, to support self-hosting, customizations and super easy integrations of advanced use cases without much overhead.

Misc

• Teams, i.e multiple admins. Supported in our backend (reach out to [email protected] for getting team members setup), but we should expose it in our frontend.

Post 2.0: Expansion & Upstream

Now with all our core & unique billing-, entitlements- and customer management methods in-place, we will focus on going deep on them all. Supporting larger use cases with more advanced needs to expanding across segments & markets. Integrating more payment- and payout methods and customization capabilities for larger customers.