Comments
By internetter 2025-03-2117:003 reply 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.
By internetter 2025-03-2117:192 reply 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.
By latexr 2025-03-2211:12 > 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.
By KennyBlanken 2025-03-2122:174 reply > 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.
By internetter 2025-03-2122:35 Yeah it’s hard for me to watch. I feel sorry for the people so attention deprived that they need to throw dozens of dollars at a streamer who makes 10000 a night for any sort of acknowledgment
That’s more or less most of the bigger Twitch streamers, because they can’t exactly keep up with the pace at which the chat scrolls by and also pay attention to whatever they’re doing.
That is why I don’t really watch those but prefer smaller streamers that might enjoy a particular type of game, or even watch the occasional programming stream. If I have a question, suddenly it’s not impossible to get an answer and most of them are also a bit more chill.
I might still occasionally throw some money their way, much like one would consider tipping a live performer, nothing too crazy though.
By webspinner 2025-03-2220:56 It's actually more-or-less the big Youtube streamers too. Because no one can keep up with the chat scroll, so ya know, they don't read everything.
By Yeul 2025-03-2214:03 I occasionally donate some money to Signal. But I do not want to feel like some part of "community". I want to help them fund the service. Not join a movement.
By wkat4242 2025-03-2212:39 > I've watched people spend $50-100 a night with a streamer. It's insane. Well over $10k a year.
$50-$100 in a night is not so special? You could spend that going clubbing. Doesn't mean they spend that every night.
Tbf if I'm spending that much I'd rather pay for in-person sexual services because that costs about the same and is obviously much nicer.
Or do you mean they spend that much every single night? That sounds obsessive even without considering the money spent.
By Abishek_Muthian 2025-03-2117:412 reply 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.
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
Open Payment Host seems to connect to credit card gateways (Stripe/Square) whereas coindrop seems to link to P2P style payment methods where you are sending funds to an "address".
By Abishek_Muthian 2025-03-222:44 That’s correct, I’ll be adding all leading payment gateways.
By internetter 2025-03-223:341 reply 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
By Abishek_Muthian 2025-03-223:54 I absolutely get it, thank you. Librepay is simple and nice; my project is geared more towards indies who want to sell their products without paying double commissions and not having to deal with multiple payment gateway integrations.
Ko-fi is unfamiliar? Not to me. I prefer it over gofundme and patreon. And LiberaPay i'd never heard of.
By internetter 2025-03-2213:481 reply No, the opposite. I’m saying I added a Kofi because Liberapay is unfamiliar
By wkat4242 2025-03-2414:13 Ah sorry for my misunderstanding
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
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.
Yup, liberapay is funded by donations on liberapay
https://liberapay.com/Liberapay/
They're the second largest recipient
https://en.liberapay.com/explore/recipients largest is Librepay. Second largest is "infosec.exchange" Mastodon instance.
infosec.exchange was first when I made that comment. I guess this HN post helped get a lot more support for liberapay
Absolutely not a bad thing! I actually joined in myself, I'm convinced this is the best way to process donations!
By culi 2025-03-2415:54 Personally I disagree with the technical stack, but I love the project and the people behind it so I too wanna support it as much as possible.
It's hard to be "the Wikipedia of X" but once a tool has achieved Wikipedia status, competitors have basically no chance. A truly crowd-sourced and people funded solution is irreplaceable once it's mature and fully established
By extraduder_ire 2025-03-2117:061 reply 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.
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.
By TZubiri 2025-03-2117:18 Not necessarily. Not every entity can do whatever they want with deposits from others, you need to be an actual bank and regulated as such to have the right to invest other people's money
By childintime 2025-03-2313:14 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.
100% less fees is not 100%. that’s like saying a bacon cheeseburger is vegetarian, except for the meat.
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.
By wuming2 2025-03-229:50 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.
