AKA: Donationware
Voluntary contributions made from private persons to individual maintainers, contributors, or OSS projects. Often these are one-time donations, but recurring payments are also becoming more common.
Requires:
- Setup of a payment mechanism (hosted or self-build)
- Description of one or more donation tiers
- Recurring "marketing activites" to motivate users to donate
Variants & Options:
- Single Donation: One-time contribution
- Recurring Donation: Monthly recurring contributions
- Tiered Donation Levels: Offering of mentions (on Twitter, etc.), swag, chats, meetups, etc. for higher or recurring donations
- Github Sponsors
- PayItFwd (NPM based)
- Dependency-based Distribution
- StackAid (Based on package.json)
- Thanks.dev (Github-repo based)
- Sponsorhello (Report only?)
- General Donation Platforms
- Self-building
| Characteristics | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Effort to set-up | Hours | Some descriptions and bank info is sufficient |
| Effort to maintain | High | Constant reminders to donate necessary |
| Cost to set-up | None | |
| Cost to maintain | None | |
| One-time Income | Low | Few private sponsors will pay more than a few dollars (due to own finances and high competition (too many projects to feed)) |
| Recurring Income | Low | Very few sponsors will pay recurringly |
| Income Predictability | Low | Constant reminders to donate necessary; Sponsors can come and go on a whim |
| Full income Threshold | 1000+ | |
| Recipient | I + C | |
| Additional Work | None | |
| Visibility | Low | Easy to forget, ignore, or overlook by users |
| Necessity to pay | Low | Completely voluntary |
| Entry Threshold | Low | Credit card is sufficient |
| Countervalue | None | |
| Scalability | Medium | Scales with the number of users (who want to donate) |
| Effort for marketing | High | |
| Competitors | None | |
| Software types | All |