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Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

thanks.dev

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Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#101

Post by buro9 »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #16
armini wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thanks for the feedback & you raise a valid point, we'd love to look at additional payment options :)

Thought about this in a conceptual way some years ago [1] and the best option seems to be to let the developers decide how they want to be paid, i.e. have a `thanks.dev` file in the tree of the package with JSON-like data, e.g. "payment": "iban", "data": "IBANCODE"` or "payment": "link", "data": "https://..." or "payment": "cryptoCoin", "data": "0xb3..." and so forth. Of course, the problem is there are many differen…

The best case is that this works.

The worst case here is a lot of fraud for the people who shared their details.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#102

Post by popey »

nicbou wrote: post #87

Donation income is risibly small. People will sign praise your work, tell you how much they depend on it, and how it changed their lives. Others will ask you tricky questions that really ought to be asked to a lawyer. ...and they still won't donate a cent. I get about 70 cents per thousand unique visitors. About one in every 14,000 visitors donate. Affiliate income is roughly 100 times that without trying. Let me put…

Depends how you present it. The Ubuntu download page used to punch you in the face asking for donations. They also tried sliders, asking downloaders to choose how to spend the money they donated. These were super successful. People felt in control of how their money was spent. There was no way for them to check in on that, it was a trust process. But the net result was a lot of people donated a very significant amount of money.

Similarly I understand (from an interview with the developer) that the eBook software Calibre gets a significant number of donations from users via the giant donate button in the toolbar.

I do agree, having a "tip jar" option for donations is rarely as successful as the above methods though. Not diminishing your personal experience. Just saying it's possible to change the way things are done, and get more.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#103

Post by robertlagrant »

gabereiser wrote: post #63
aunty_helen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony of "someone should build something for free" when complaining about a donation system for helping open source projects get paid for their work.

No, the idea of having a simple payments system for open source devs to use to get paid for their "free" software should be "free". Let the merit of the software dictate. That's the whole point of open source. To build things freely and openly to make the best possible software that we (humans) can make. We should also expect the same in the tools we rely on to do that work. It's not a hard ask. It's a philosophy of…

> Let the merit of the software dictate

What does this mean? Using this service is letting the merits dictate. It doesn't stop anyone building a competitor.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#104

Post by throwaway74567 »

rekoil wrote: post #89
fmx wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://thanks.dev/faq says: What are your fees? Tips at time of donation. You decide. If payment is required to use a service then that payment is not a "tip" - it is a "fee". Anything over the required payment would be a "tip". This FAQ answer implies that the required payment is zero, which, it turns out, is false. There is absolutely nothing wrong with charging a fee for a service, but there is something wrong wi…

> There is absolutely nothing wrong with charging a fee for a service Agreed, but percentage-based fees can quickly become an unfairly large part of payments. I love the idea of this project, but I'd prefer there to be a 5% or X dollars minimum, so that if 5% is more than X dollars, then it doesn't force 5% minimum. If I'm donating $500 to 45 projects, then each project on an even split is getting $11, but thanks.dev…

My guess is that more than half of that $25 goes to the payment provider (Stripe etc.). Maybe more.

The remaining ~$10 will go to thaks.dev to cover operational costs, administration and other expenses.

I don't expect them to work for free. If you think it's unfair, contact the developers directly to see if you can wire them money (to avoid PayPal fees). If it's too much work, you can pay services like thanks.dev that does the work for you.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#105

Post by robertlagrant »

coldtea wrote: post #95
pharmakom wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe 5% is the wrong number, but how do you expect the lights to stay on?

They could give the ability to sponsor their own service with donations in the exact same way they do it for third party FOSS projects.

They're trying to solve the problem, not add to it.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#106

Post by theshrike79 »

After Google shut down Google Reader I specifically went looking for an alternative I could pay money for and landed with Newsblur[0]. I've been a happy customer ever since.

Pretty soon after that I moved over from Gmail to Fastmail[1], again it was a service that took my money so that I was the customer not the product being sold.

[0] http://www.newsblur.com [1] https://fastmail.com/

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#107

Post by robertlagrant »

lars_francke wrote: post #99

In case you hadn't seen this yet, GitHub offers this service: https://github.com/sponsors/explore (need to be logged in) I have no insight but I could imagine that GitHub are going to offer something similar based on that data at some point in the future. For us the "top" developers on that page are people with 150+ repos that we depend on that I have never head of before. It turns out that they are all tiny JavaScri…

> A 5% flat fee is too much for me though, if it had a cap then it'd be different.

It can't have a cap if payment gateway processing fees are percentage-based.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#108

Post by eliaspro »

Sephr wrote: post #23

The UI imposes a 5% minimum (and 15% default) value for "Tip thanks.dev" under "How much would you like to donate each month?" on https://thanks.dev/settings This implementation is clearly for-profit. I want to directly tip open source projects using a system that doesn't involve other third parties taking a significant cut.

For every OpenSource project I donate to, I check, whether they provide a SEPA IBAN, then I just set up a monthly transfer of a small amount that I can afford instead of a bigger single donation. Whenever possible, I try to avoid any instances in-between which take some % of the cake.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#109

Post by robertlagrant »

qwerki wrote: post #67
aborsy wrote: post #49

I use like 50 different software heavily. Each of these has like tens of developers. I can donate to some and rotate each month, but how about the rest, and dependencies? There is just so much software there that seems hopeless (although there are also billions of users).

Our take on this is that funds should distribute across the dependency tree. We currently facilitate trickling your budget 3 levels deep. https://thanks.dev/static/how covers this in more detail.

That seems like a pretty sensible way of doing things.

I wonder: will people find a way to exploit it? E.g. create a simple but useful dependency that uses 100 sub-dependencies, all by the same author? Will larger, more self-contained dependencies lose out to small ones?

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