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Hans Pagel
Co-founder · Scalar
Open source Developer tools
Pagel helped turn Tiptap into one of the most used open-source editors on the web, and he now brings that open-source playbook to Scalar's API tools.
“With Tiptap we built a renderless text editor for the Web,” Hans Pagel wrote in 2020, when the open-source project he co-created was taking off. He is now a co-founder of Scalar, which builds open-source API references, docs, SDKs, and MCP servers from OpenAPI files.
Design School and a Studio of His Own
Pagel started writing code as a kid and studied design, according to his personal site. He co-founded überdosis, a German digital studio, with Philipp Kühn, and the company sponsored their work on Tiptap.
Tiptap
Tiptap began as Kühn's side project, and the pair moved it into überdosis and rewrote it as Tiptap 2. In an October 2020 post, Pagel reported 8,000 GitHub stars and 2.7 million downloads that year, along with about $200 in donations for roughly 500 hours of work.
Tiptap announced in November 2022 that Pagel and Kühn had left überdosis, Tiptap, and Hocuspocus, thanking them for having “kicked things off.”
Open Source at Scalar
At Scalar, Pagel leads open-source work. “My work focuses on open-source developer tools,” he writes on his site, adding that building companies has also meant working on product, marketing, sales, support, and hiring. He lives in Berlin, Germany.
