There is no develop, master is continuously deployed. Users can create feature branches and PR them but there is just no merge commit, they are pulled in fast-forward. In projects where I need stable releases, I create stable/1.2.x type branches off of master at a point in time. I cherry-pick commits onto it after the first release if there are subsequent ones.

You can see this in action here:

https://github.com/dj-stripe/dj-stripe/commits/master

https://github.com/dj-stripe/dj-stripe/commits/stable/1.2