Liberapay – A recurrent donations platform
en.liberapay.com
en.liberapay.com
Currently they have chicken-egg problem of attracting users, but I'm hoping they'll grow, because gittip was great at its peak.
785 new users in the past month? €815 transferred last week? If their total throughput is under $5000/month they have some growing to do before becoming much of a Patreon alternative.
They also seem to have their own opinions about things that should be best left to users.
Similarly, having a (relatively low) limit on maximum donations I imagine is done to avoid running into anti-money laundering regulations (which are particularly strict in France).
However, I cannot stop feeling that the real issue is not really the receiving end but the giving end.
The amounts given to software creators are generally small, little more than pocket money. It's far from something that can sustain, even partially, a developer.
What I would love to see, specially in tech companies, is something like a 50$ 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.
What is the difference in costs between them?
Open Collective seems more interesting due it's transparency.
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.
One piece that seems to be missing from this is donation based rewards like Patreon does.
Check out Donorbox (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.
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.