awesome-oss-monetization

Monetization via Private Donations

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

Platforms

• Github Sponsors
• PayItFwd (NPM based)
• Dependency-based Distribution
  • StackAid (Based on package.json)
  • Thanks.dev (Github-repo based)
  • Sponsorhello (Report only?)
• General Donation Platforms
  • Liberapay
  • Patreon
  • Flattr
  • Ko-fi
  • tipee
  • Buy Me A Coffee
• Self-building
  • Stripe (self-build)
  • PayPal (self-build)
  • Paddle (self-build with international tax handling)

Evaluation

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

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