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Sell GitHub Repository Access

With Polar you can seamlessly offer your customers and subscribers automated access to private GitHub repositories.
  • Fully automated collaborator invites
  • Unlimited repositories (via multiple benefits) from your organization(s)
  • Users get access upon subscribing & removed on cancellation
  • Or get lifetime access upon paying a one-time price (product)

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Use cases

  • Sponsorware
  • Access to private GitHub discussions & issues for sponsors
  • Early access to new feature development before upstream push
  • Premium educational materials & code
  • Self-hosting products
  • Courses, starter kits, open core software & more…

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Create GitHub Repository Benefit

  1. Go to Benefits in the sidebar
  2. Click + New Benefit to create a new benefit
  3. Choose GitHub Repository Access as the Type
You first need to Connect your GitHub Account and install a dedicated Polar App for this benefit across the repositories you want to use it with.
  • Click Connect your GitHub Account
Why do I need to connect GitHub again and install a separate app?This feature requires permission to manage repository collaborators. GitHub Apps does not support progressive permission scope requests. So instead of requesting this sensitive permission from all users (unnecessarily) in our core GitHub Login this feature uses a standalone app instead.
Once you’ve authorized our dedicated GitHub App for this feature you’ll be redirected back to Polar and the benefit form - now connected and updated.

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Repository

Select the desired repository you want to automate collaborator invites for.
Why can I only connect organization repositories vs. personal ones?GitHub does not support granular permissions for collaborators on personal repositories - granting them all write permissions instead. Since collaborators would then be able to push changes, releases and more, we do not support personal repositories by default.Want this still? Reach out to us and we can enable it.

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Role

Select the role you want to grant collaborators.
  • Read (Default & Highly recommended)
  • Triage
  • Write
  • Maintain
  • Admin
Read access (read-only) is what 99.9% of cases should use and the others are highly discouraged unless you have special use cases & absolutely know the impact of these permissions. Checkout the GitHub documentation for reference.
Anyone with read access to a repository can create a pull request (source).
Additional Costs for Paid GitHub OrganizationsGitHub treats collaborators as a seat and they will incurr charges accordingly to your billing unless you’re using a free GitHub organization plan. So make sure to confirm you’re on a free plan OR charge sufficiently to offset the costs you’ll need to pay to GitHub.