
Liberapay – A recurrent donations platform - NicoJuicy
https://liberapay.com/
======
Loic
This is interesting. The non-profit is a French association under the so
called 1901 law[0]. In Germany it would the equivalent of an Eingetragener
Verein[1]. This structure is flexible, well defined and relatively safe, that
is, they are not going to run away with the money as you have quite some
reporting work to do and the reporting must be available to everybody. So,
from a legal structure point of view, this is really a nice thing. Now, they
need to find their users.

[0]:
[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_loi_de_1901](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_loi_de_1901)

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_association_(German...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_association_\(Germany\))

~~~
NicoJuicy
Thanks for looking it up! It validates the opinion I had when I checked them
out

------
NicoJuicy
Since Facebook fan subscriptions recently released. Another multinational
corporation tries to claim 30% on the shoulders of developers/content
creators/...

I would rather see a "true" non-profit appear and claim this space. I also
trust European non-profits more than American ones.

The platform (Liberapay) lives on donations, supports different currencies,
multiple languages, has multiple integrations ( Github, Gitlab, Youtube, ..)
and doesn't take a commission.

Which is the first time i see something like this.

Note:

No affliation with Liberapay, it was mentioned in another topic and i found it
newsworthy ( Facebook fan subscriptions on the frontpage ... )

~~~
hkai
The question is not the money, the question is freedom of speech. A platform
taking a commission is no big deal compared to the fact that it is allowed to
determine what opinions are allowed and what aren't.

~~~
pjc50
The platform _has_ to determine what it's funding, because it's dependent on
(a) local law (b) payment processors (c) the goodwill of the rest of its
customers.

Nobody's going to help someone fund their child-porn-to-Iran scheme, and nor
should they.

~~~
Y_Y
Unless you call it something cool, like "Tor".

~~~
JetSpiegel
Tor is a security tool that might be used for evil purposes.

It's not a gun, Tor is not developed so that pedophiles can share child porn.

~~~
Y_Y
And guns aren't developed for murders. But that isn't the point I was trying
to glibly make.

People contribute to lots of well-intentioned took that contribute some kind
of indirectly to evil things.

------
Deimorz
Note that Liberapay had to change payment processors, and in the process they
changed how the payments work ([https://medium.com/liberapay-blog/liberapay-
status-update-a7...](https://medium.com/liberapay-blog/liberapay-status-
update-a76403f4e0)).

I get the impression that they're getting into a state now where there's
probably an "expectations mismatch" between what people expect to be doing
when they set up a recurring donation compared to how Liberapay actually
works.

As the blog post mentions, now you can say "I want to donate $5/month" and you
put in $60 to cover a year, but you have to pay that full $60 immediately,
_and_ the recipient also receives the whole $60 (minus fees) right away as
well. After that point, there's not really any way for the donator to change
their mind and stop donating after a few months, so it's more like a one-time
donation with a reminder but still being presented as a smaller recurring one.

I think the problem is that overall it will end up encouraging people to make
smaller donations for shorter time periods because they won't necessarily want
to commit for many months or years' worth up-front. Then that means that they
have to be sent reminders to re-donate more often, which feels more annoying
and will probably result in people just letting their donations lapse more
often than repeatedly renewing them.

~~~
kzrdude
You diplomatically state this, but they fail to deliver on the most important
thing of their service, surely there is a plan to fix this?

~~~
cyphar
It used to work this way, and the way it was done is that you would pre-load
your account with money and then they would transfer it (transaction fees made
withdrawals each month prohibitively expensive).

Unfortunately they were forced to change payment processors (MangoPay kicked
them off their platform without an explanation) and they weren't able to find
a new payment processor that gave them the same feature (having a staging bank
account).

The blog post that GP linked explains things in far more detail.

------
kabacha
I love liberapay but everytime I go there I see that developing floss is not a
viable career path even for the best of the best. Weekly income is no more
than 100€, that's what like an hourly rate of top end freelance developer
(which really a lot of these guys are).

Projects like this are a very bittersweet victory for floss comunity. One step
at a time I guess.

~~~
cyborgx7
Liberapay is not the only platform that allows for free software to be funded.
Here are two projects that are very well funded on Patreon. The platform
itself is obviously not open source, but the projects themselves are:

[https://www.patreon.com/godotengine](https://www.patreon.com/godotengine)

[https://www.patreon.com/mastodon](https://www.patreon.com/mastodon)

~~~
jelv
There are so many good projects on Liberapay:

[https://liberapay.com/Mastodon/](https://liberapay.com/Mastodon/)

[https://liberapay.com/archiveis/](https://liberapay.com/archiveis/)

[https://liberapay.com/davidrevoy/](https://liberapay.com/davidrevoy/)

[https://liberapay.com/GIMP/](https://liberapay.com/GIMP/)

[https://liberapay.com/UBports/](https://liberapay.com/UBports/)

[https://liberapay.com/F-Droid-Data/](https://liberapay.com/F-Droid-Data/)

[https://liberapay.com/pixelfed/](https://liberapay.com/pixelfed/) (open
source federated Instagram)

[https://liberapay.com/SFTtech/](https://liberapay.com/SFTtech/) (open source
Age of Empires II)

[https://liberapay.com/Telegram-FOSS/](https://liberapay.com/Telegram-FOSS/)

[https://liberapay.com/phpMyAdmin/](https://liberapay.com/phpMyAdmin/)

[https://liberapay.com/Framasoft/](https://liberapay.com/Framasoft/)

[https://liberapay.com/matrixdotorg/](https://liberapay.com/matrixdotorg/)

[https://liberapay.com/Krita/](https://liberapay.com/Krita/)

[https://liberapay.com/Nextcloud/](https://liberapay.com/Nextcloud/)

[https://liberapay.com/ReactOS/](https://liberapay.com/ReactOS/)

------
trymas
I've found interesting that it's a fork for
[https://gratipay.com/](https://gratipay.com/)

------
venturin
Recurring payment, so many platforms now...

[https://maecen.com/](https://maecen.com/)
[https://www.tipeee.com/](https://www.tipeee.com/)
[https://patreon.com/](https://patreon.com/)
[https://www.buymeacoffee.com/](https://www.buymeacoffee.com/)
[https://flattr.com/](https://flattr.com/) [https://d.rip/](https://d.rip/)

What other platform to host a profile and raise money monthly do you know ?

~~~
dandare
As a content creator, what I need is the ability to create multiple projects
under one account. I want people to donate to separately to each individual
piece of content I create.

Ideally, a payment platform should offer an API for creating projects
programmatically and retrieving information on the funding.

------
cyphar
I've used Liberapay to donate to the Matrix.org project[1] for the past few
years. It's a bit of a shame that the new Stripe integration is actually a
direct bank transfer of your entire donation amount (in other words, recurring
donations are actually lump sum donations).

This doesn't make a difference for most projects, but it is something to
consider -- though Liberapay has always required a lump sum deposit into
_their_ accounts for recurring payments so I guess this is a safer setup.

[1]:
[https://en.liberapay.com/matrixdotorg/](https://en.liberapay.com/matrixdotorg/)

------
vincvinc
I love this but the main page should clearly state the thing that makes
everyone here so interested:

> Liberapay takes 0%.

> We are a European non-profit and open source.

> We are funded by donations.

Now it's "just a recurrent donations platform".

------
carwyn
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Open Collective yet:

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

They have an expense claim transparency system for each collective and a cool
gifting system for larger organisations to allow their staff to donate to
different collectives from the company pool.

------
worble
This seems really great, I was thinking of doing something like this recently
as well, although I was thinking more along lines of:

\- I have a set amount of money I wish to give each month (say £200)

\- Given I have setup x amount of people I wish to donate to, the system will
automatically spread my money evenly amongst the creators, or using a given
weighting provided

\- I'll be able to add any new creators to this list and not have to
recalculate the amount given to each one, given I'm still putting the same
amount of money into my "donation pot"

Looking at their current system it seems to still follow the old paradigm of
"set up a creator and set the amount for each of them individually", I hope
that they could support something more like the above some day. Personally,
the mental burden of having to continually reevaluate my monthly spend is
probably the biggest burden when considering donating to someone new, which
only gets larger as your donation list gets larger, so having the a system
offload this I think would be a great way to encourage more donating.

~~~
mcherm
Then you should take a look at Flattr
<[https://flattr.com/>](https://flattr.com/>). They are older than Patreon
(although they never got the same level of widespread use as Patreon) and they
operate in exactly the manner you describe.

~~~
worble
Huh, can't believe I hadn't seen this before. I suppose the main problem with
all of these systems is that the creator ultimately has to sign up to them in
first place, and unfortunately all these smaller sites just don't have the
people I want to donate to on them. There's no quick and easy answer to that
unfortunately, outside of trying to federate some kind of standard for all
donations that clients could plug into, and we all know how that goes[0]

[0][http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png](http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png)

------
luigi23
Ha, so Facebook by claiming 30% of the profits basically advertised Patreon
and Liberapay by not emphasizing the benefits. Instead of promoting 'ready-to-
use' audience they've been caught in the middle between high percentage and
fuzzy copyright rules. Good job

~~~
iagooar
This is what greed gets you.

------
kemitchell
Do I correctly understand that Liberapay currently receives 20.50 EUR per week
from 64 patrons?
[https://liberapay.com/LiberapayOrg/](https://liberapay.com/LiberapayOrg/)

~~~
mattbk1
The organization behind the website does. The website development team is at
[https://liberapay.com/Liberapay/](https://liberapay.com/Liberapay/).

------
pjc50
Interesting, although really lightly used; if I'm reading this correctly the
top payee only has 280ish subscriptions?
[https://liberapay.com/explore/individuals](https://liberapay.com/explore/individuals)

------
dharma1
Are donations made with Liberapay tax deductible for companies or individuals
(at least in the EU?)

~~~
Tepix
Probably only in France

~~~
maeln
Not even. Only "charity" are tax deductible in France and not every Loi 1901
association are considered to be "charity". The state control the status that
allow to be tax deductible and they strict rule about what your association
need to be about to apply for it but also how it is organized.

Now, if you use Librapay to give to an association or an NGO that has the
status, nothing prevent them from giving you the tax deduction proof that you
are going to need to show the tax office.

------
kemitchell
Their legal page seems to implies that they comply with European money
transmission laws. How about the US?

Recall:
[https://gratipay.news/gratipocalypse-42fd0ec0d9e8](https://gratipay.news/gratipocalypse-42fd0ec0d9e8)

~~~
mattbk1
May not directly answer your question, but Gratipay held funds in escrow and
Liberapay does not.

------
jancsika
Suppose Terry Davis had had a liberapay account, and a developer had read an
article about him being in a bad way at some point in the past.

Suppose that developer then decided to donate some funds to Terry using
liberapay.

Would such a donation have complied with French hate speech laws?

------
ancorevard
More important than the 0% commission is how open this platform will actually
be, or will it also engage in politics and police certain speech as they see
fit?

~~~
gilrain
Hopefully they will police hate speech and other forms of speech which are
rightly illegal due to their inherent intention to infringe on other people’s
rights, yes.

You can use a hateful platform like Hatreon if you wish to spread those views.
Because your freedom of speech isn’t being trampled on, it’s just that
civilized people don’t want you junking up their property.

~~~
vgoh1
Companies need to leave the policing to the police. Also, hate speech is not
illegal in USA, nor should it be. It is a complicated issue - everything that
is wrong should not be illegal or banned.

~~~
q3k
It is, thankfully, illegal in France, and as such Liberapay does have to
police it. Again, if you want to spread hate speech, you'll have to use
another platform.

~~~
gadders
Given that Jean-Marie Le Pen was able to campaign for years, I find it hard to
believe it is illegal.

~~~
fwn
In practice, actual hate speech (the respective local legal norm, not the
battle cry) doesn't govern what you can say but how you can say it.

Jean-Marie Le Pen managed to formulate many of his statements in compliance
with local hate speech regulations. Far from all of them, though. See:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-
Marie_Le_Pen#Issues_and_p...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-
Marie_Le_Pen#Issues_and_policy_positions)

