Liberapay

https://en.liberapay.com/

by nanna • 1 year ago

352 89 1 year ago

en.liberapay.com

3x3m3• 1 year ago

No way to donate Bitcoin?

If the end user wants to accept bitcoin, they will publish an address one can directly transfer to. It is peer-to-peer, so no need for a service.

filmgirlcw3• 1 year ago

No and it isn't on their roadmap. Projects who want to accept crypto should probably just put a wallet address on their pages rather than trying to rely on systems like Liberapay that aren't setup to facilitate transfers.

wkat42424• 1 year ago

True the whole thing about Bitcoin is that you don't need that middle man

arcticbull• 1 year ago

However, we do not handle any crypto-currency.

Thankfully not.

culi9• 1 year ago

What value would that add? Recipients accepting crypto usually just put up a wallet address. Why add a middle person

rchaud3• 1 year ago

convert the bitcoin to fiat and send away.

patcon• 1 year ago

I love Liberapay. I wish more people in the EU used it or contributed to it (it's FOSS) instead of using Patreon or GitHub Sponsors.

wuming2• 1 year ago

Also in the EU SEPA CT is an option. Lowering fees from 3%-5% to about 1% or less depending on the bank. Thanks to ECB infrastructure.

daghamm2• 1 year ago

I like librapay, I wish more people would use it.

I also hope they can reduce the ratio paid to paypal/stripe. More money should go to devs.

yawndex• 1 year ago

I don't think that would be possible, as Liberapay is essentially just a UI for accepting donations directly into the developers' Stripe/PayPal accounts.

m00dy2• 1 year ago

good catch, it is not a payment processor.

simjnd• 1 year ago

What are the payment processing fees?
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.

greenie_beans2• 1 year ago

ooo curious how hard it is to integrate this with Ghost. It's a perfect CMS for non-profits who are good at blogging and email marketing.

rpgbr• 1 year ago

Ghost integrates directly with Stripe, no need to have an intermediary like Liberapay.

greenie_beans2• 1 year ago

i know. i misunderstood liberapay as an alternative to stripe

culi9• 1 year ago

I follow a lot of very small youtube creators. I can often convince them to start a liberapay just for me to donate. They get 100% of the cut* (Patreon takes 12-16%) and I am supporting both the creator and Liberapay's popularity

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

extraduder_ire• 1 year ago

I think a notable feature of patreon's cut is that they only take it on withdrawal. I don't know how that works for individual's tax exposure, but it does serve to inflate the cash amounts on the site from people using their patreon income to patronise others.

culi9• 1 year ago

Ah that is interesting. I didn't realize that. Is Patreon then allowed to basically act like a bank? Where they can invest the cash that's currently sitting in a Patreon account? Essentially, everyone leaving money in Patreon is giving them a micro-loan

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.

bilekas2• 1 year ago

Just out of interest because it sounds a little too good to be true, but it the content creators keep 100% of the donations, how are LibrePay funding the operation itself ?

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.

culi9• 1 year ago

Yup, liberapay is funded by donations on liberapay

https://liberapay.com/Liberapay/

They're the second largest recipient

sneak• 1 year ago

100% less fees is not 100%. that’s like saying a bacon cheeseburger is vegetarian, except for the meat.

childintime• 1 year ago

It would be nice if you could add multiple (youtube) channels, as team members, and fund the collective from your (fixed) donation, each then takes their (partially auto) share from it.

internetter7• 1 year ago

Liberapay is my platform of choice! It lacks a lot of flashy features but it feels like the closest thing to an 'exchange between friends' instead of a commercial sort of relationship.

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.

internetter7• 1 year ago

Cont... To the best of my understanding and lived experiences, there is a strong correlation between 'ethical compromise' on the part of the content creator and how much they can expect to be compromised for their work

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.

KennyBlanken2• 1 year ago

Onlyfans creators creating pseudo-relationships.

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.

latexr• 1 year ago

Adding tiers to step up the donations (e.g. maybe you could convince most of the $3.99 folks to do $4.99)

.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.

Abishek_Muthian3• 1 year ago

Have you considered self-hosting a payment page? I'm asking because I've been building Open Payment Host[1] a self-hosted FOSS payments host supporting multiple payment gateways; still very much a WIP but I hope soon it will be viable enough for someone like you.

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.

[1] https://github.com/abishekmuthian/open-payment-host

culi9• 1 year ago

What does your app do differently than something like coindrop[0] which is essentially a linktree page linking to all donation platforms for a creator

[0] https://coindrop.to/

internetter7• 1 year ago

Hi, I'm excited to see more FOSS options available. I don't think this is exactly what I need because I just want a very simple interface like what liberapay provides... not to sell anything... but I'm very happy more people are working on this

wkat42424• 1 year ago

Ko-fi is unfamiliar? Not to me. I prefer it over gofundme and patreon. And LiberaPay i'd never heard of.

internetter7• 1 year ago

No, the opposite. I’m saying I added a Kofi because Liberapay is unfamiliar

bsnnkv• 1 year ago

Does Liberapay provide the various tax forms a receiver needs to file their yearly returns in the US?

creer• 1 year ago

The receiver does not need any tax forms in the US.

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.

internetter7• 1 year ago

This is an oversimplification. More than likely, income from Liberapay can be categorized as a 'gift.' Often, gifts aren't taxed to the recipient, so long as its less than $18,000 (this is not tax advice), Liberapay does not provide tax forms or tax advice. Its up to you to accurately categorize the income you receive based on the LiberaPay ToS, the expectations of your donors and the IRS, and your specific campaign.

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)

filmgirlcw3• 1 year ago

Last time I checked into this, the answer was no. This is very much a more EU-focused service, based on the stuff they offer. And even then, they don't pre-collect for VAT like Patreon does.

(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")

[1] https://github.com/liberapay/liberapay.com/issues/714

mariusor• 1 year ago

This is just my assumption, but I think liberapay being targeted at "to individual" payments/donations is the reason why they don't push too hard in adding these kind of features.

mvdtnz• 1 year ago

One thing I like in a payments system is when the website goes down from a little bit of traffic.

johnisgood2• 1 year ago

They submitted it to HN to try out their new {hard,soft}ware. :D

nanna2• 1 year ago

I submitted this Liberapay link, and have no association with it besides funding a few projects and coders through it. They wouldn't have been expecting a surge in traffic.

cozzyd• 1 year ago

-lerapay?

mixmastamyk• 1 year ago

Hmm, the name seems a bit off. "Librepay" makes me think of a user-respecting service. Liberapay sounds like it is based in Liberia or something.

gjm11• 1 year ago

It has an entirely different inappropriate association for me. Having spent years singing in choirs, when I see the name I get the words "Liberapay, Domine, de morte aeterna in die illa tremenda..." running in my head, to the tune of the spiky fugal setting in Verdi's requiem.

juunpp2• 1 year ago

liber/a/um is Latin.

seltzered_• 1 year ago

Related: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flattr flattr , which shutdown in 2023.

brianzelip• 1 year ago

https://github.com/liberapay/liberapay.com

amryl• 1 year ago

Can it be compared in any way with GNU Taler payment system ?

riffraff• 1 year ago

No, it's something like Patreon, not a currency infrastructure.

Changaco4• 1 year ago

Not really, but support for Taler could be implemented in Liberapay. If someone is able and willing to tackle that, there's a possibility of funding the work with an EU grant: https://github.com/liberapay/liberapay.com/issues/1309#issue...

nickpsecurity• 1 year ago

Has anyone done a review with the strengths and weaknesses of Liberapay vs common platforms?

bullen• 1 year ago

I wish they had ways to setup fixed price recurring payment items.

Right now I use gumroad but they take a very high fee.

KennyBlanken2• 1 year ago

745 new donations have been started in the past month, increasing total weekly funding by $899.10
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...)

Changaco4• 1 year ago

There are no text selection blocking tricks on Liberapay. Selecting works fine in Chromium, but Firefox seems to be choking on the SVG icons.

rchaud3• 1 year ago

Text selection works fine on Brave Android (Chromium).

lazzlazzlazz• 1 year ago

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.

Stablecoins seem so obvious it's unbelievable.

Galanwe• 1 year ago

Unfortunately, depending on where you live, there could be high fees, fiscal and compliance complexity when dealing with crypto currencies.

crazygringo• 1 year ago

Stripe supports stablecoins if the merchant enables it. They still charge 1.5% though.

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.)

DrNosferatu• 1 year ago

Can you keep how much you’re earning private?

Changaco4• 1 year ago

Yes. The box to check is in https://liberapay.com/about/me/edit/privacy

smallerfish• 1 year ago

Since it's nonprofit, are donations 501c3 deductible? I am on the council of a conservation foundation based in Costa Rica. We want to make it easy for US based philanthropists to donate and receive some tax benefits from the donation.

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.

[1 - https://www.amigosofcostarica.org/]

juunpp2• 1 year ago

It is French, so not specifically 501c3.

https://en.liberapay.com/about/legal

rchaud3• 1 year ago

Donations to Liberapay itself could be considered tax deductible if they are domiciled in the same tax region as you. Liberapay is the nonprofit, not the parties it transmits funds to.

nanna2• 1 year ago

Fellow Emacsers, note there are a few accounts on Liberapay of people who make some of the things we love:

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/

webspinner2• 1 year ago

I remember seeing this a while ago, but it's a decent alternative to Patreon!

Liberapay

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