Poeng Linkhow much do you donate to the apps you use?
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I’ve got some standing orders of 1 or 2 euros every month for bigger projects like grapheneos and kde. And for small apps that I actively use, I try to donate 5 or 10 euros now and then. It’s not much but I believe if everyone is doing their part we succeed in the long run
Not as much as I should be tbh.
Change that, it’s the only way there projects will survive.
I second everyone donating a little would keep their favorite projects healthy. As a guy I follow says, the small donation is the one that didn’t come.
Also answering your question, I usually pay the minimum tier to not get stretched thin and go broke. 🥲
Every month about 10-20 euro, but nothing recurring.
I setup a list of my open source tools and I try to one at a time donate to each one. But its a slow process and feels too less, but I don’t want to do recurring ones, though I know it would be the best for the projects.
I donate 25€ per month to Droidian. It uses the Android kernel to run a Debian based Linux distro on phones.
Though I would rather see mainline Linux on phones succeed, I believe this could be the best alternative to iOS / Android (OS) until that happens.
When one of my “cloud” devices / services becomes “enshittified”, I’ll donate what the provide is asking to a related open source self-hosted project.
I also “buy” the major update for whatever software I use regularly.
None because I’m barely managing to avoid homelessness each month if I made more then I would do so though.
No problem we each do what we can in this hard world.
1$/month to every project I frequently use via Liberapay.
Nothing because I literally have no money
I don’t have “literally no money” but yeah I’m in the same boat. Used to donate but with the price of everything going up the last couple of years, it’s drained any and all discretionary spending…
Look on a price comparison site. Most of the bill increases are due to the loyalty tax.
huh?
Companies always give their best deals to new customers. You are likely paying way higher than market rate for your bills.
That’s not the issue, I promise.
Somewhere between $10 and $50 per transaction. Its not every month, but just randomly throughout the year depending on what I have.
I donate 100€ to KDE every year. I consider it my “windows license”, since it was the DE that allowed me to escape from windows 7 years ago.
The annual KDE reminder works on me. I also donate yearly to thunderbird and other random foss projects that are important to me like pihole. I pay for bitwarden to support them while keeping an instance of vaultwarden running as backup.
The other thing I try to do in lieu of donating is turning on metrics for applications I use daily when the option is there and whitelisting those domains in pihole.
I pay for BitWarden, not so much because of any feature in their premium offering as that they are critical infrastructure for me and have acted consistently ethically. Also the annual Wikipedia and for a while Mozilla monthly. Way less than what I feel is deserving.
However, I have been working on building a social foss funding site where you set a total recurring donation amount which is then distributed by the Method of Equal Shares accordrding to weights you specify, ether manually or sourced from your os package manager.
Main benefits of that approach is that your budget is fixed, you can spread it over an arbitrary number of recipients, and priority is given to those that are more unique to you.
Would love to hear thoughts if anyone is interested. I hope to maybe test out an alpha version some time in 2026 if time permits.
Sounds cool. I do like the idea of sourcing it from the package manager, because honestly there is an insane amount of packages that go into a modern distro and knowing them all is either impractical or impossible. Something like this would also be nice for charity donations as well. It might exist for that, but if it does I’m unaware of it.
Wikipedia has enough money to pay their costs for decades, so I recommend dropping them.
Don’t have anything recurring. More like random $10-20 thrown here and there. It’d probably be more often if it was all more integrated/streamlined. Pretty much the hyped up Flathub payments feature someday. I’d do that more often than patreon/opencollective/etc. I’ve had a patreon sub for a few projects over the years
Yearly budget of $200 for any apps I constantly use. I split the amount between the apps. Donate more if I have extra funds.
Cool I like idea of budget and splitting it between apps
Yeah, I do £10 a month and just give the money to a different project I use each month and log it in my notes app.
I agree completely with this. I only donate a token amount of ~2 EUR per year to some projects: it won’t do anything by itself, yet still, if everyone did the same, it would be really impactful.
For a few projects that are most important to me, I donate up to ~15 EUR per month. It’s both a lot of money, and also not a lot at the same time. By itself, it still has a tiny impact, but it is a decent monthly expense, especially when donating to a few projects.
To me it really highlights that we can’t help fund anything by ourselves. After donating some amount yourself, the next best thing you can do is encourage other people to donate too!
There’s a really cool project called Snowdrift that tries to harness that dynamic. They came up with a concept called "crowdmatching", where everyone’s donation is linked to the number of people donating to the project (up to a cap).
Although progress on that project is quite slow, I really hope to see it succeed some day, as I think it really thoughtfully and neatly manages to coordinate people to band together to fund projects, and make a real difference as a group.
I started to donate once a year to my Linux os and apps I like. I also need to set up a small monthly for apps I like. If we don’t show support when we can we will lose the some great projects.
One time donations of $5 only, I am poor
When ive used a project for a while and i have extra cash I usually do a 20$ donation. Ive been low on money last year so I only donated to a few of the projects, listenbrainz and Lemmy.
Ideally I want to donate a small amount yearly to all the projects I use.
I donate 5 to 10 aud every 6 months or so for connect for lemmy since i use it every day
I haven’t yet donated, because u want an easy and privacy minded way to donate. I’m not fan of crypto, because I still don’t understand how. How do you donate and still have privacy? Like I don’t want the bank or state to know what I support..
Crypto is likely the best solution. You should get some Monero and donate that. You can ask an AI chatbot like Google AI studio how to get some and put it into a self custody wallet in your country.
I like the little badge I get for being a donar on Signal. Other than that, my default is $5/mo or whatever the site’s recommended amount is.
Some years I donate nothing. Other years it’s about 50 euro… Depend on a lot of things. I believe in giving to the free software, because that makes it better, and since I’m a user, that’s great - and I like to keep it running.
$10 a month and sporadic donations to projects I believe are making a difference
None, I’m unemployed and don’t have the money to spare :3
When I still had my last job I would donate really any time I thought about it, around 5-10$ a time. Still not really enough, but it was part time minimum wage.
I donate to Signal. I intend to increase my contributions to other open source (Linux) projects this year though. I expect them to need it more than ever soon.
For the free programs I use, I have a total of around 100$ to give every year. The more programs or projects I want to support, the less there is for each. Otherwise, I’d just become poorer and poorer.
For paid pograms and services, I’m also trying to not go for the cheapest but the ethically better ones.
I also have a 2 patreons to support creators who speak about FOSS.
I think you don’t have to give much, but you should always try to give something every year.
About 20-30 euros each month. I Always budget 30 and give a bit more to tools I use regurarily and disperse the remainder on projects I tried, liked and felt like I wanted to donate to that month.
Depends on the project and the kind of utility I get from it. Up to $20 USD typically, but I’ve donated more for specific cases.
I donate $50 a year to KDE and GrapheneOS each.
Gonna donate $50 a year to Libreoffice and maybe CachyOS starting June.
Gonna donate the same to the Servo browser if it becomes even remotely usable.
Used to donate to Mint but stopped because I don’t use Mint anymore.
Servo is actually quite usable, right now.
I tried it. If I remember correctly it had no bookmarks, no dark mode, no adblock. Those three features are essential for me in a browser. Especially bookmarks, I have 6500 bookmarks.
6500 bookmarks? Do you use then like I do? Add a bookmark. Never look in bookmarks.
Assuming you do use them, how often do you visit 6500 websites? Seems like searching in general would be easier than searching through your bookmarks.
Do you run a script now and then to see if the site still exists?
Finally I cant tell you how curious I am what you bookmark for 6500 websites. Consider exporting them?
I have my bookmarks in folders and subfolders, so I can find them when I need to.
In terms of what my bookmarks are:
- 2300 Video game bookmarks
- 800 Manga bookmarks
- 600 Music bookmarks
- 750 YouTube videos to watch
- 250 YouTube videos saved because they were good
- 150 News articles and blog posts to read
- 120 Books, movies, and TV series
- 100 Various privacy services I need to switch to
- 600 Old bookmarks that I moved into a folder instead of deleting
The core theme here is that I refuse to use built-in tracking mechanisms. I don’t want vendor lock-in so I use bookmarks instead to manage them (which Qobuz makes very difficult).
Gotta say that is organized.
Curious about bookmarking video games. Like games online? Guides? How would that work? You can self host collections, so why the book mark?
Same with Manga, why not self host your own library?
Seems like you are making a lot of work for a browser when the tools to do it much easier are already there.
With games, they’re are various categories like:
1. Demos I want to play
2. Demos I’ve played and my opinion on them
3. Demos that I might want to play, but I haven’t decided yet.
4. Games that aren’t worth putting on my Wishlist, but that I’m not prepared to discard entirely.
5. Games from my wishlist that I’m unsure if I actually want to play and that I need to sort.
6. Games that I haven’t wishlisted but might want to.
7. Everything to do with itch.io because their launcher and storefront is garbage.
In terms of manga, I use a database site but there are limitations.
1. There are some I’ve read one chapter of and saved for later, some I’ve read nothing of but want to read, and some I’m reading but put on pause because of the release schedule.
2. When it’s time to start a new manga, I normally pick out more than one. When that happens I bookmark the list and go back to it after I finished the previous one.
3. There are manga from before I started using a manga database and haven’t sorted.
4. There are manga that I’ve marked as “want to read” but for various reasons am reconsidering.
5. There are oneshots I’ve read on Reddit and saved.
As for why I don’t self-host, I don’t really want to buy more disk space in this economy. Also (and more importantly) a collection of pirated manga is far harder to backup than just a database. In terms of preservation, I have so much new stuff to read that I’m not too fussed if something goes away.
I do it differently; I essentially have a software list there, too, and all are categorized.
5 to 10 bucks here and there for things I use. I do have a couple 5 a month subscription. I could probably give more but I forget
I’m donating a shy of 20€ per month to services automatically on Liberapay/Opencollective as long as I can. I do /try/ to give back on the projects that I use a lot in either my time and effort (IE: sitting in their IRC channels helping people for example), or a monetary donation.
It’s not much, and I hope these open source projects never become something that depend on money and donations, but there are always cost to running services online.
Infrequently. Sometimes like 5 euros. Could do more but I am not fully reliant on open source. I wish ublock origin accepted donations though.
What I will say is that if you donate small amounts, saving up is better if possible. I know some charities I donate to mentioned transaction charges could be 1 or 2 euros per transaction. So donating a low amount could really eat into your donation.
In Germay / Europe we have a good banking system where oftentimes you don’t pay for the transaction. You just need an IBAN.
Giving money to stripe or paypal seems to be nuts, imo.
I am European but it really depends in what service they use for the automation.
I donate 0. I hope I’ll be able to do more once I get the new job.
(I have a monthly donation budget, but it’s spent on other causes at the moment.)
hoping to figure that out this year, once I do an overhaul of what I’m using and figuring out
just know that half of my budget for this will come from what I was previously spending on mega corp subscriptions (not much, but more than I am now). the other half will be based on its value to me
I live by rule “if everyone gave me 1 euro…” so I donate 1 euro/month to projects I use often (but I send actually 12/year to spare the devs some trx costs) and 1 euro/year to projects that I use sometimes (again I send 5 Eur/5 years actually). I use almost only open source and I haven’t yet paid everyone. I also recently made an open source application where I didn’t setup any donations channel, I simply like doing it.. Maybe in the future if I have more work on it, but not now..
10€ monthly for Godot
None.
Reason being simply financial responsibility - if something is free, then giving out money for it seems wasteful, like throwing money out of the window. You can argue it’s not much, I got value from, it supports the developer, it’s the moral thing to do, and you would probably be right. But this is simply not the priority perspective from which I am looking at it.
You’re not throwing money out the window though, you’re giving it directly to someone. Someone who has used their craft to create something that has value to you. I’m not necessarily criticising you for not donating, I just want to shift your perspective that your money wouldn’t be valued by other people.
I know, but if it was that easy to shift perspectives, the world would be a completely different place. I dislike the donation format since it plays a lot on the moral and psychology of the person - how much is enough, how much value does it actually provide me etc. Like I am the one doing the sales for the person. I much rather have a clear price.
Maybe it’s just because of donations and the “uncertainty” it makes me feel. I did pay for open source software before (open source != free), guess I prefer just to see a clear price tag.
That’s a fair take. I can relate to the feeling of uncertainty. When I make small donations of a couple of euros I have to push away my feelings that the donation could be seen as insultingly low. It’s hard to judge what a “fair” price is. But after all, many donation buttons say “Buy me a coffee” so I would hope the amount is appreciated either way.
Found the economist
Not sure what is that supposed to mean?
I can only assume it is supposed to be some kind of insult, and can only invite me in the future never to even reconsider donating, seeing how “not doing what I expect you to do” creates toxic comments and bashing.
Care to elaborate?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus