Donating with Liberapay

Vladimir Rusinov — Sun, 25 Oct 2020 21:26:29 GMT

Donating with Liberapay

Recently I've stumbled upon Liberapay.

Liberapay is a non-profit crowdfunding platform. It does not charge any fees for donations. Instead it relies on donations itself: Liberapay has an account on Liberapay, and you can donate to it the same way you would donate to any other user. Another big upside is that it appears to be entirely open-source.

The biggest downside is that it does not appear to be very popular, and UX is somewhat questionable. So there isn't a lot of projects and people to donate to.

Still, I found a few things and set up a few tiny recurring donations.

Then I thought it would be interesting to get some. Mostly as a social experiment - I would be surprised to get a single cent.

Receiving donations from Liberapay

The setup was fairly straightforward. Any registered user can add Stripe or PayPal account. I was not registered in either, so I opted to sign up for Stripe which took around 10 minutes.

Then in order to attract people I've installed a couple of buttons on this website. It required a small modification of templates. The buttons use JavaScript but appear to have a fallback, and don't appear to set or collect any cookies.

It is also quite easy to add "Donate" button to GitHub. Once simply needs to place .github/FUNDING.yml file to their default branch. For me it looked like this:

liberapay: rvs

There are more docs and examples on GitHub.

Donate away

Click my button, give me some money. I don't intend to profit on it, and would try to match anything given to me, though quite likely not through Liberapay unless it suddenly becomes more popular.

I found following interesting (to me) projects there:

Liberapay itself
Syncthing - Open-Source p2p file synchronization tool. I did not set up donation in Liberapay since I already donate through other channels.
LVFS - collaborative initiative to install firmware in Linux

www.rusinov.ie (Posts about donations)

Donating with Liberapay