Add Patreon to donation options

[stefanke]

The main advantage that patreon has is that it only allows recurrent payments. Basically you could offer transferring into the tommy server as a reward and promise improvements when donation goals are reached. Another advantage is that it displays how much and how many people are willing to donate for your services and since it is a third party service they know those numbers are real.

[Krydos]

We looked at it in the past and decided against it because their fees are really high compared to what we use now. I suppose we can take another look to see if their fees are more reasonable yet.

[wolstech]

They actually just hiked them in September 2017. They apparently don't want to deal with people contributing < $5/month, so they changed their fee structure to penalize users who pledge less than $5/month (these tiny donors now get to pay even more in fees...).

 

I suppose it wouldn't be bad for larger donors, but I'm not aware of any recurring larger ($5+) donors beyond maybe 1 or 2 users. Would the aggravation of setting this up be worth it for these people?

[Bailey]

Maybe Selly.gg might be a good idea.

[badrihippo]

What about Liberapay? Their model is slightly different; all the donations leave your account at once, and then you get a reminder when it needs to be topped up.

 

They're a non-profit so don't have processing fees on their own (all their funding is from a "Liberapay" account on their own website  )

[wolstech]

I'm trying to understand the purpose of that one...it says it uses Paypal (or stripe) to actually handle the payment processing, so it's not really any different than just accepting recurring donations via paypal (which we already do). They look to just be a middleman between paypal and those seeking donations.

 

With the addition of VPS service and an increase in larger donations though, I wonder if Patreon itself might be more feasible now. In the past their model that penalizes small donors made no sense for us, but we now have quite a few larger ones.