Liberapay
en.liberapay.com
en.liberapay.com
For the type of works I link my LiberaPay to, I don't have nor want tiers and rewards associated with them, as that forms a social contract where I am expected to perform more labour. I only want money from people who are thankful for what I've already provided, and I only want what they're willing to provide.
I suspect microscopic rewards like discord roles, a news letter, ect. do increase revenue, but then again you're managing a community.
I encountered issues with Stripe so that's been disabled, PayPal only, but PayPal doesn't auto renew. Again, I suspect I lost a considerable amount of money because of this. But again, taking money from people who wouldn't explicitly click 'renew' when they get the email doesn't feel right.
I also began offering Ko-fi as an option, however, because some people are uncomfortable with unfamiliar platforms.
1. A donation link in the footer... people only see it if they're looking for it
2. More overt reminders (when KDE added a single yearly popup notification, donations dramatically increased)
3. Adding tiers to step up the donations (e.g. maybe you could convince most of the $3.99 folks to do $4.99)
4. Adding rewards to fuel the funder's egos (I try to send personal emails thanking them but this isn't an explicitly mentioned 'reward' unlike, say, positions in the credits)
5. In addition to rewards, supplementing income with sponsors. The sponsors frequently are exploiting both the creator and the consumer (e.g. Honey), but nevertheless compensation does increase. Also, affiliate programs. Hard to do without your own integrity being compromised when recommending products.
6. 'Dangerous' monetization that plays with emotions. Onlyfans creators creating pseudo-relationships. Entire sponsored videos for stuff like gambling.
Of course, it is hard to argue that the oft. underpaid content producers are really the ones making ethical concessions when they exist under a system that... underfunds them... but nevertheless it is undeniable that there are ethical concessions, and these concessions are made because they increase revenue.
The really really sad part is that you really only see big creators throwing doing this stuff despite already having more than enough, and they always get away with it, whereas if a small creator were to pull this their audience would eat them alive.
Twitch, as well. I've stopped watching streamer after streamer when it became clear they were only responding to people throwing money at them constantly.
I've watched people spend $50-100 a night with a streamer. It's insane. Well over $10k a year.
The same people probably write a $100 check to the local food pantry.
That is why I don’t really watch those but prefer smaller streamers that might enjoy a particular type of game, or even watch the occasional programming stream. If I have a question, suddenly it’s not impossible to get an answer and most of them are also a bit more chill.
I might still occasionally throw some money their way, much like one would consider tipping a live performer, nothing too crazy though.
$50-$100 in a night is not so special? You could spend that going clubbing. Doesn't mean they spend that every night.
Tbf if I'm spending that much I'd rather pay for in-person sexual services because that costs about the same and is obviously much nicer.
Or do you mean they spend that much every single night? That sounds obsessive even without considering the money spent.
.99 price points are explicitly designed to manipulate. If I ever went to donate and saw that as a tier, I’d close the window and reconsider my support of the creator. Don’t try to fool me, be honest and ask for the full amount.
P.S. Please ignore the AI autocomplete feature, I included it as part of Google hackathon to raise funds for the project; I'll be removing it in the upcoming release.
The main downside is lack of integrations with the tiered perks Patreon offers. Most of the creators I follow don't really rely too heavily on the feature but I can see it becoming a larger hassle if a creator has to manage two platforms
* less fees
A somewhat related feature of Liberapay is there's a lot of flexibility in the frequency of your payments. You can enter in $5/week but it will suggest a payment frequency that minimizes fee. E.g. paying $21.43 every 30 days instead.
Edit : My lazy self actually went and read up on it :
> Liberapay does not take a cut of payments, the service is funded by the donations to its own account. However there are payment processing fees.
This is a great example of dogfooding.
https://liberapay.com/Liberapay/
They're the second largest recipient
It's hard to be "the Wikipedia of X" but once a tool has achieved Wikipedia status, competitors have basically no chance. A truly crowd-sourced and people funded solution is irreplaceable once it's mature and fully established
Org Mode: https://en.liberapay.com/org-mode/
- Ihor Radchenko (Org mode maintainer): https://en.liberapay.com/yantar92/
- Bastien "bzg" Guerry: https://en.liberapay.com/bzg/
- Timothy "Tec": https://en.liberapay.com/tec/
Magit: https://en.liberapay.com/magit/
- Tarsius (Magit, Transient maintainer): https://en.liberapay.com/tarsius/
Guile Emacs: https://en.liberapay.com/guile-emacs/
I also hope they can reduce the ratio paid to paypal/stripe. More money should go to devs.
https://helloastra.com/blog/article/average-software-develop...
The numbers in your source also contradict your statement, but point taken that European dev salaries are much nominally lower than American ones. It's still obviously not enough to pay a dev and business expert
EDIT: wow I just checked and the weekly amount they receive just went up to ~$875!
> The fees vary by payment processor, payment method, countries and currencies. In the last year, the average fee percentages have been 3.1% for the payments processed by Stripe and 5% for the payments processed by PayPal.
Giving 97% of the money to devs is pretty amazing. They also don't take a cut from donations made.
Right now I use gumroad but they take a very high fee.
Payers are obligated to issue tax-related forms in certain circumstances. But the receivers don't even need those to file their own tax paperwork.
Your payment processors (PayPal and Stripe) absolutely do provide tax forms. Its your responsibility to make appropriate use of them. But Liberapay itself doesn't have forms it needs to provide (and by god you don't want to provide tax forms or tax advice you aren't required by law to give)
Nowhere in this statement does it say "gift rules only apply to friends and family"
If you reach the point where a substantial portion of your income is Patreon or whatever (and thus, you wouldn't be otherwise performing the entertainment service), I'm sure the IRS would view it differently.
"a recipient generally can exclude from gross income for federal income tax purposes a donation from a nongovernment donor as a gift if the donation is motivated by detached and disinterested generosity and is not in anticipation of an economic benefit or in return for services."
ref https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-wd/03-0025.pdf and Commissioner v. Duberstein, 363 U.S. 278 (1960)
perhaps, my categorization of "more than likely" could be incorrect. But given how relatively small[0] most accounts make on Liberapay, that is what I imagine most in the US would be calling it.
(I just checked and couldn't get a definitive answer but since it's been 5 years [1] since there was any update on a ticket requesting the ability to offer invoices in PDF form of your monthly receivables, my gut instinct says the answer is still, "no")
There is an organization named Amigos of Costa Rica [1] which is set up for this purpose, but they have somewhat steep fees on top of the payment processor's, and they only reconcile the balance on a weekly basis, through wire xfers, which is not ideal.
> 14 new pledges have been made in the past month, adding $35.79 of weekly donations waiting to be claimed.
> 20,426.66 was transferred last week between 14,076 users.
Not really encouraging stats for a system that has been around for ten years, though maybe the PR from being mentioned on here will give it a boost.
(It took considerable effort to copy that text, because they are using text-selection blocking tricks. Nowhere else on the page is this the case...)
Stablecoins seem so obvious it's unbelievable.
Building and maintaining integrations and dealing with customer support and monitoring accounts for fraud costs money.
And the number of people who keep spending money in stablecoins is minuscule. (I'd never use them because I want fraudulent transactions to be able to be reversed.)
Thankfully not.