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.
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.
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
Currently they have chicken-egg problem of attracting users, but I'm hoping they'll grow, because gittip was great at its peak.
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.
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 $5000/month they have some growing to do before becoming much of a Patreon alternative.
>Payments come with no strings attached. You don't know exactly who is giving to you, and donations are capped at €100.00 per week per donor to dampen undue influence.
They also seem to have their own opinions about things that should be best left to users.
I believe one reason they do it this way is that they want to ensure that they stay firmly in the realm of donations and might not inadvertently move to selling stuff (by creators starting to provide benefits to people who donate). This is a key difference from Patreon. Selling stuff comes with lots of different legal requirements, which is why e.g. Patreon will deduct VAT for European patrons.
Similarly, having a (relatively low) limit on maximum donations I imagine is done to avoid running into anti-money laundering regulations (which are particularly strict in France).
It's nice to have more numerous and better options for donations.
However, I cannot stop feeling that the real issue is not really the receiving end but the giving end.
The amounts given to software creators are generally small, little more than pocket money. It's far from something that can sustain, even partially, a developer.
What I would love to see, specially in tech companies, is something like a 50$ 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.
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
OpenCollective is pretty expensive: 10% fees for them plus 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction for Stripe. (See https://opencollective.com/faq)
Of course, they also provide a lot more services - in a way, they manage bookkeeping etc. for you. So if you want or need those services, they can be very interesting, but if you are just looking for a cheaper alternative to Patreon they are not.
I couldn't find the source code of Open Collective, at least not from their homepage. Is it like github that says it supports "open source" but the platform itself is not?
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.
- 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.
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.
