
Ask HN: Best ways to accept donations? - earlz
So I have a page on my website that effectively provides all the information to fix a very terrible AT&amp;T modem. Apparently AT&amp;T themselves have internal documents pointing to my website to fix problems with their modem.<p>I get tons of &quot;thanks&quot; comments and such, so I would like to try adding a donation button to just this page. Traditionally, I think donation buttons are tacky, but it&#x27;d be very nice to effectively break even on my (cheap) hosting.<p>The only donate options I really know of are paypal and bitcoin. Are there other players in the field and&#x2F;or things to be wary of with these two?
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spindritf
Put up an ad for a better modem. Or maybe some Amazon affiliate link.

Or compile all the info into an ebook/pdf and put a "support this site and get
all the info in a printer-friendly pdf" link to some self-publishing platform.
I think they usually handle payments for you.

There was a project featured on HN just yesterday that allows you to sell
documents stright from Dropbox/Drive[1]. Although they seem to be just using
PayPal.

There's also Flattr[2] for small donations to websites. But they're probably
more popular in Europe.

[1] [https://sellboxhq.com/](https://sellboxhq.com/)

[2] [https://flattr.com/](https://flattr.com/)

~~~
chinmoy
I second the PDF option. Create a PDF of your article and sell it with
Gumroad's 'pay what you want'/flexible pricing feature. You can select the
minimum pricing to even $0. So, people can pay whatever they think your advice
is worth.

Another advantage of this is, you get to collect the email addresses of people
who purchase. You can easily email them later if you update your tutorial or
something.

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derefr
To try to give you a different answer than the other comments here, let's try
working backward from the goal. You want money. Who has money to give in this
scenario? It's not the people fixing their own modems; if they did, they'd pay
someone else to fix their modem, or they'd buy a new modem, or what-have-you.
You probably won't see much in donations from them, if you go that route. No,
the people with really ridiculous amounts of money in this scenario are AT&T.

So, next step: how can you cause AT&T to give you money? Well, what do you
have that they want? They certainly might be _depending_ on your documentation
internally. They might not even know how much they make use of it (which means
they have to assume the worst.) So "continued access to your documentation"
can be something you can provide them in exchange for money.

Conclusion: revoke access to your documentation from AT&T's IP block (or just
be lazy and take down the site entirely), and send them a legal notice
requesting that they purchase a license (one-time or recurring, whatever suits
you) for continued use of the documentation. Hold your documentation hostage,
in other words.

Large companies deal with IP licensing all the time; for them, this is just
one more thing to expense. For you, though, this will probably outweigh all
the donations the page would ever make you. _And_ you'll be making it from the
people who made the crap modem, instead of the people who unknowingly
purchased a crap modem. :)

~~~
dave_sid
Sounds interesting, but it might be an idea to install Google Analytics (or
anything similar) to see if there is really significant traffic coming from
AT&T in the first place before going to this trouble.

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ChrisNorstrom
Aside from Paypal & Bitcoin...

Stripe = [http://viget.com/advance/accepting-donations-online-and-
how-...](http://viget.com/advance/accepting-donations-online-and-how-stripe-
can-help)

Dwolla =
[http://help.dwolla.com/customer/portal/articles/217452-dwoll...](http://help.dwolla.com/customer/portal/articles/217452-dwolla-
buttons-for-your-website)

Flattr = [http://flattr.com/](http://flattr.com/)

Could you show us the page? I'm curious.

~~~
ams6110
Also wepay... [https://www.wepay.com/payment-
buttons](https://www.wepay.com/payment-buttons)

I use their invoicing services and they are excellent. Have never tried their
payment buttons though.

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gummify
I know in the UK, the sites below were popular. However, they aren't a button
but a site you have to set-up.

[http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/giving/](http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/giving/)
[http://www.justgiving.com/](http://www.justgiving.com/)
[http://www.paysimple.com](http://www.paysimple.com)
[http://www.wepay.com](http://www.wepay.com) ...and maybe Google Checkout?

------
dewey
If you want to add microdonations you could add
[https://flattr.com/](https://flattr.com/)

------
cwhitaker01
What's the page? I want to fix my terrible AT&T modem.

~~~
bwblabs
I guess [http://earlz.net/view/2012/06/07/0026/rooting-the-
nvg510-fro...](http://earlz.net/view/2012/06/07/0026/rooting-the-nvg510-from-
the-webui)

------
KHPatel
[http://wepay.com](http://wepay.com)

I _think_ they're designed specifically for this.

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djent
Litecoin is another option.

[https://litecoin.org/](https://litecoin.org/)

~~~
edwardy20
And how many donations are you going to get with that?

~~~
djent
How many donations is he going to get in the first place with PayPal or
whatever else he may choose? If I had to guess, probably not too many.

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jpamorgan
[https://spacebox.io/](https://spacebox.io/) would be a beautiful and simple
way to go. its built on top of Stripe.

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iambot
I'd recommend gumroad.com [1] as a simple button to accept micro payments.

[1] [http://gumroad.com](http://gumroad.com)

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jchung
Have had a very good experience recently with givlet.

