
Liberapay – A recurrent donations platform - cdancette
https://en.liberapay.com/
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cdancette
What's interesting compared to patreon (and the latest policy change) is that
they take absolutely no fees. The only fees are transaction fees, totally
transparents. They are financed only with their liberapay account, where you
can pledge money.

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Arathorn
We have been pretty happy with using liberapay for Matrix.org - the biggest
problem is really a feature rather than a bug: the donations are anonymous so
you can’t recognise your supporters. But this is what makes it a donor service
rather than a “get rewards” service like Patreon... and is what minimises the
tax.

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kjrose
Yeah. They need to be able to offer rewards to really take off.

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bondant
"Liberapay is only for donations, meaning that transactions must not be linked
to a contract nor a promise of recompense."

[https://en.liberapay.com/about/faq](https://en.liberapay.com/about/faq)

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pornel
Technically this is a fork of gittip/gratipay, but the key difference is that
they've done paperwork required to operate as a financial institution, and
avoided the "gratipocalypse":
[https://gratipay.news/gratipocalypse-42fd0ec0d9e8](https://gratipay.news/gratipocalypse-42fd0ec0d9e8)

Currently they have chicken-egg problem of attracting users, but I'm hoping
they'll grow, because gittip was great at its peak.

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kjrose
If they can offer similar offerings to Patreon I don’t see why not. And
considering patreon’s Offerings are slim pickings right now I don’t see why it
wouldn’t be hard to match.

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fencepost
This may grow and become an alternative given the funding changes and possible
policy changes at Patreon, but right now it almost looks more like a proof of
concept or MVP.

785 new users in the past month? €815 transferred last week? If their total
throughput is under $5000/month they have some growing to do before becoming
much of a Patreon alternative.

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ktta
>Payments come with no strings attached. You don't know exactly who is giving
to you, and donations are capped at €100.00 per week per donor to dampen undue
influence.

They also seem to have their own opinions about things that should be best
left to users.

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ar0
I believe one reason they do it this way is that they want to ensure that they
stay firmly in the realm of donations and might not inadvertently move to
selling stuff (by creators starting to provide benefits to people who donate).
This is a key difference from Patreon. Selling stuff comes with lots of
different legal requirements, which is why e.g. Patreon will deduct VAT for
European patrons.

Similarly, having a (relatively low) limit on maximum donations I imagine is
done to avoid running into anti-money laundering regulations (which are
particularly strict in France).

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kakwa_
It's nice to have more numerous and better options for donations.

However, I cannot stop feeling that the real issue is not really the receiving
end but the giving end.

The amounts given to software creators are generally small, little more than
pocket money. It's far from something that can sustain, even partially, a
developer.

What I would love to see, specially in tech companies, is something like a 50$
credit that each employee can see fit to give to any OSS project/developer.

For example, given our extensive usage of Postgres, and given how fundamental
it has been in our operation, I would love to give them a few bucks and I'm
pretty sure I would not be the only one to do the same.

Another thing that might be great, is to have some foundations to give to.
Then this foundation would identify some core but low visibility projects
(like OpenSSL pre-heartbleed for example) and distribute funding to them. This
role can also be assumed by the donation platform.

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dawhizkid
Maybe not so surprisingly a very successful implementation of pay-content-
creators-a-monthly-subscription-fee-for-content is a platform to subscribe to
amateur adult video stars on onlyfans.com

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jdright
[https://opencollective.com/](https://opencollective.com/)

What is the difference in costs between them?

Open Collective seems more interesting due it's transparency.

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daveid
The transparency might be a turn-off for individuals. Some artists on Patreon
choose to hide the amount they receive altogether.

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mattbk1
You can choose to hide how much you receive.

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kjrose
Is there any reason someone wouldn’t want to use a variety of these platforms
to take payments. Like liberapay, Patreon, and some others. It’s not like you
have to pay more in transaction fees and it would allow your contributors a
variety of ways to donate.

One piece that seems to be missing from this is donation based rewards like
Patreon does.

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stephendonor
Liberapay seems to be a new solution in the market.

Check out Donorbox ([https://donorbox.org](https://donorbox.org)), a veteran
in this market.

\- Donorbox helps you receive donations for free on any of the website \-
Donorbox has easy to use integrations with WordPress, Joomla, Weebly, Wix and
others. \- More than 6500 nonprofits, churches, artists use Donorbox to
receive donations.

Hope this is helpful.

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breakingcups
Would you happen to be affiliated with Donorbox in any way?

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gaetanrickter
Please start accepting cryptocurrency as this is the way forward.

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tom_mellior
How would that work, though? If creators want to accept cryptocurrency, they
can already put an address on their web site and watch the money rolling in.
No need for an intermediate.

If creators want other currencies but you want to pay in cryptocurrency,
Liberapay would have to do the conversion for you. But it's questionable why
that would be a good idea. They would have to use yet another intermediary.

