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Comment by johnebgd | Hacker News Reader

If you value WireGuard and can spare a few bucks the inventor/maintainer is getting about 1/10th what they publicly ask for to maintain:

https://www.patreon.com/zx2c4

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Thanks for posting this; we appreciate it. More generally, donation options for the project are listed here: https://www.wireguard.com/donations/

That ( https://www.wireguard.com/donations/ -- repeating for completeness and exposure) is surely much better link for donations, as some of us would feel limited with a single "Patreon" option.

There are other possibilities for individuals:

"Monthly: GitHub Sponsors, Paypal, Patreon, Liberapay"

"Once: Stripe, Bitcoin, Paypal"

And also "for non-profit foundations and companies."

Thanks!

Any way you can add a "choose your amount" box on patreon, or a lower amount? I try to drop micro-contributions with creators via patreon and $15 is above the current budget for something I don't (yet?) make much use of.

Go to https://www.wireguard.com/donations/ and click on GitHub Sponsors, there's a $5/month option there.

If you work for a company that uses Wireguard, please ask your employer to contribute.

What's the rate of companies doing this?

I have no real idea, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is less than 1%.

The problem I ran into is that my company will match employee contributions to registered non-profits. Wireguard doesn't seem to be a project under a registered non-profit. My company won't donate to a random Patreon or PayPal link.

There have been numerous threads here on HN about this: donating to people to support open source development does not match up with what companies usually do, so it runs into all sorts of corporate friction. Whereas a monthly or annual support contract is the sort of thing that companies do all the time, and at low dollar amounts it might not require much approval at all.

Unfortunately it is up to open source developers themselves to set their business model, and many don't seem to like (or want to do the work of) setting up overtly commercial relationships like support contracts.

I finally emailed my bosses asking our company to give about 100$ a month spread over various projects. I thought not to ask too much as 100$ infinitely much more than 0.

We're not a very big company, could easily afford 1k a month though, but then it becomes an actual sum that's harder to motivate as we're mainly working with MS products.

I would place a bet on not greater than 0.1%

I do rely on Wireguard for some personal projects and I can spare a few bucks. However the reality is I can't get to $15/month the minimum tier. I rely on thousands of opensource projects. Upstreaming should help my arguments for adoption at work; they wouldn't think twice.

You can support on Patreon for less than the minimum tier. It is just the cut-off over which the rewards (such as stickers here) are given. Support for just $1! He'll still get it!

Thank you, they could make this clearer.

I didn't know this either. I guess that's why many projects have a fake $1 tier with just "the pleasure of knowing you contributed" or something like that as the "reward" for that tier. To let people know that that's still an option.

I agree, I would have signed up for a $1 tier or perhaps $2 but $15 is far too high for the minimum tier. I support the Zig author for $1/mo and hope others would do the same for my open source projects in the future.

Apart from knowing that 15 USD monthly is not a minimum possible donation there, please see other possibilities to donate on the official link for donations (also posted here). Patreon is only one of the options.

If you go to wireguards donation page, you can make a one-time donation too.

The minimum donation in Bitcoin is probably about US$0.01. Anyway that's what I've paid in transaction fees the last few times I made a donation where I didn't care how long it would take. (They were confirmed within a few hours.) Transaction fees for within-the-hour confirmation are around US$0.20.

Don't let "it's not enough" stop you. Make a one time payment of what you can afford within reason. They don't expect you to put yourself out.

it seems there are confusing / multiple sources of income, patreon is only one.

I don't know if it's fair to say he's not making what he asks for.. or basing a 1/10th claim without knowing how much he gets from other sources. (Bronze/gold partnerships GitHub donations, stripe, crypto donations, and some others).

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