https://thanks.dev/faq says:

  What are your fees?
  Tips at time of donation. You decide.

If payment is required to use a service then that payment is not a "tip" - it is a "fee". Anything over the required payment would be a "tip". This FAQ answer implies that the required payment is zero, which, it turns out, is false.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with charging a fee for a service, but there is something wrong with lying about it.

> There is absolutely nothing wrong with charging a fee for a service

Agreed, but percentage-based fees can quickly become an unfairly large part of payments. I love the idea of this project, but I'd prefer there to be a 5% or X dollars minimum, so that if 5% is more than X dollars, then it doesn't force 5% minimum. If I'm donating $500 to 45 projects, then each project on an even split is getting $11, but thanks.dev is getting $25 even though their service isn't actually in use by my app/service. Seems unfair to me.

My guess is that more than half of that $25 goes to the payment provider (Stripe etc.). Maybe more.

The remaining ~$10 will go to thaks.dev to cover operational costs, administration and other expenses.

I don't expect them to work for free. If you think it's unfair, contact the developers directly to see if you can wire them money (to avoid PayPal fees). If it's too much work, you can pay services like thanks.dev that does the work for you.

Then they should call it what it is: A fee (to cover operational expenses). It's still not honest to call it a tip.

(And now I'm realizing that American tipping culture may be playing in to differing expectations here...)

EDIT: I see they have now updated their wording.

> half of that $25 goes to the payment provider (Stripe etc.)

Surely they are not making a transaction for every patron/maintainer combination, but rather batching the payments.

Otherwise yes this is a Stripe charity :)

Why on earth would you think that a payment provider is taking 50%? They take ~3% + 30 cents

It's literally public information

Please take more time to read the context. If you read the post that I replied to instead of jumping to conclusions, you will find that you are incorrect

$25 refers to the 5% fee of the total amount ($500) that the site takes. I said that more than half of that fee is used to pay Stripe.

You're right @fmx. Have now updated the FAQ per helpfulclippy's suggestion. Thanks for pointing this out!

How do you suggest we can better word/explain it?

"We charge a 5% minimum fee on each payment. If you like what we do, you have the option of leaving a tip."

Actioned. Thank you helpfulclippy! :)

Came across this platform before that takes no commission and depend solely on donation.

https://en.liberapay.com/

The platform itself is also a project on the platform, where the donation happens

https://en.liberapay.com/Liberapay

Lp is refreshingly absent of bullshit. It's a very simple website that does donations, and donations well.

GitHub sponsors isn't too bad, they take a 3% cut (and the CC takes another 3%). But you're effectively donating to Microsoft, which feels icky.

The irony of "someone should build something for free" when complaining about a donation system for helping open source projects get paid for their work.

Why would this be irony? If anything it's irony that they're offering a for profit service to facilitate donations vs adding themselves as a donor recipient on their platform.

No, the idea of having a simple payments system for open source devs to use to get paid for their "free" software should be "free". Let the merit of the software dictate. That's the whole point of open source. To build things freely and openly to make the best possible software that we (humans) can make. We should also expect the same in the tools we rely on to do that work. It's not a hard ask. It's a philosophy of not wanting a corporation to own the keys and profit from others work. Stripe already takes 2.9%+. I don't want someone else taking 10%-30%. Then I have to give the government 30%.

The "free" in FOSS is about being able to use the software as you see fit, without restrictions. Not that you don't have to pay a dime. Sure in practice the software is usually "free as in beer" but that's a side-effect, not a goal (or guarantee).

I'm aware what the "free" in FOSS is.

> the idea of having a simple payments system for open source devs

A payment system is never simple and if it's more than a standardized "funding.txt" format it will have running costs and someone has to cover these. How much this system should charge is debatable, but it should probably be higher than 0%.

> Let the merit of the software dictate

What does this mean? Using this service is letting the merits dictate. It doesn't stop anyone building a competitor.

> To build things freely and openly to make the best possible software that we (humans) can make.

This only works in a system where humans do not need money to live. This is not our system. In a capitalist system, for better or for worse, if you don't own a means of production you must work to get money because you need money to live.

We should recognize the value of work, and if it is useful, pay for it. It is only normal in such a system. I wish we were in a commons-based society, that all resources and production would be decided by workers in quantity and distributed based on needs, but that's not our system.

It works exceedingly well in our current system.

The problem comes from people believing they should be paid for willingly giving away the fruits of their labor.

I only use FLOSS and don’t feel I’m missing out at all.

Have you not read the too many stories of open source developers struggling to make ends meet ? Of the gpg guy saying he might give up because it's just too much ? Of all the devs on the edge of burnout because of all the stress and the demands of people not here for participating but only for their own service ? Of the very article we're talking about ?

I would love to live in a system where everyone is actually free to do whatever they want with their time, all day long, all year long, but that's not where we live today. What kind of people has enough time and energy to devote hours of their lives to something that is not their primary way of earning money ?

I too use only FLOSS, and only put out project under copyleft licenses, but that doesn't mean I'm blind to the structures in which we live in.

That seems to be different from this article[0]:

> Thanks.dev presently supports itself through a voluntary tip percentage that, if more than zero, gets deducted from donation amounts along with a Stripe payment processing fee prior to distribution.

I also think they should allow manual addition of projects. E.g. I use Syncthing but that won't be found in my Github/Gitlab scans. I can donate via Github too but would be easier if I can have one place to control all such donations.

[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/07/thanksdev_open_source...

Thanks for the feedback & suggestion. This is something we’d love to incorporate in our roadmap.

Jumping on the top comment, something bothers me about this thread.

I'm seeing comments from two separate accounts, but when you look at their about, they seem to be the same person:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=qwerki https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=armini

My Name is Armin Nehzat (aka armini), my brother is Ali Nehzat (aka qwerki). Feel free to also look us up on linkedin if that helps. Here's a podcast of my brother talking about how he started the project https://podcast.sustainoss.org/148

Try this perspective: As an open source dev, I don't mind taking them 5% of the donation I recieve from their platform.

That seems reasonable to me. I assume they are using stripe for payments, so that's already 2.9% gone to facilitate you giving money to the project.

Not to mention hosting costs :)

Sponsors have a slider that allows them to adjust their tip from 5% to 100% of their monthly donation. We figured minimum 5% would cover our compute & merchant fees but left it to the community to decide what we should get. We thought this was the most aligned approach with open source. Totally open to other ideas and suggestions though.

Under "Why don't the sum of my individual donations total to the amount I've donated?" you list stripe processing fees as #1...

So no, if you're taking a minimum of 5%, then any reasonable person is going to assume that you've already deducted the processing fees, not covering them out of that 5%.

I don't think you're being open and honest here.

I don't see any dishonesty here. They are in fact covering the fee out of the 5%. That means they are taking less than what "reasonable" persons think in your opinion.

The text may be imprecise, but it's a long way from dishonesty. In my opinion dishonesty requires a motive, and I don't see it here. If the 5% did not include fees, it would perhaps be different.

I think your approach is reasonable. There will always be comments from people who think everything should be "free" without considering costs.

In a perfect world, Stripe and the credit card companies could waive the fees for donations, but that is not the case.

Someone has to actually cover those fees.

I work for a > 100 people company where the business model is entirely based on donations. We are using stripe for payment and it costs us money, but you can still use our service freely if you want to.

I agree it is not simple, but it proves it is doable.

Maybe 5% is the wrong number, but how do you expect the lights to stay on?

They could give the ability to sponsor their own service with donations in the exact same way they do it for third party FOSS projects.

They're trying to solve the problem, not add to it.

If their solution is good, it should also be applicable to them

The difference being that this service has real tangible costs such as card fees for every transaction. That's not really comparable with "it would be nice to be paid for my time" when pushing your code to GitHub. I haven't used the site but it seems reasonable that one solution won't apply to all kinds of projects.

They could break out the transactions explicitly. That would help reduce the feeling that they're taking more than their share, if they're not doing that.

They could also sing a song, do a little dance and tweet a word of praise for your generosity.

At some point the dance isn't worth the peanut.

Well, if they're there to secure a good chunk of peanuts for themselves, for being the intermediator, many would find this shady and wont want to deal with them.

Sorry, someone donating $10,000 to their favorite FOSS doesn't want an intermediator to take in $500 just for making the transaction.

Even more so when the actual transaction infrastructure is not going to be their's anyway, but some banks or Stripe or whatever.

> Sorry, someone donating $10,000 to their favorite FOSS doesn't want an intermediator to take in $500 just for making the transaction.

This phrasing is just inappropriate, and the situation you cite is an extreme.

> many would find this shady and wont want to deal with them

What's the point of armchair prognostication? We'll find out, and their pricing isn't fixed in stone?

humble bundle suggests a tip and sliders with a 3 part system : what goes to the dev, what goes to charity, what goes to humble bundle.

Nothing stops you there to put 100% into one of those and 0% on the others.

Absolutely appreciate & respect your perspective. We're passionate about making open source sustainable & understand that there can be multiple ways of achieving this goal. The more ways money is channeled to the community the better...

I think it would be easier to defend taking a cut if the cut was calculated in the same way as for the dependencies, e.g. next.dev being automatically added to the list.

Obviously I meant to write thanks.dev

For every OpenSource project I donate to, I check, whether they provide a SEPA IBAN, then I just set up a monthly transfer of a small amount that I can afford instead of a bigger single donation. Whenever possible, I try to avoid any instances in-between which take some % of the cake.

There is some overhead in collecting money. When you use a charge card a small percentage goes to the credit card and processing companies.

There are some gas stations in Massachusetts that have a slightly lower cash price because they don’t have to pay that fees and pass along the savings. Most businesses nowadays just fold that fee into the price.

If they are upfront about how much I’m ok with it. Otherwise you can send a check, but no one is using that option.

The service also completely blocks VPN users with a 403. That seems like blocking a pretty good chunk of your target audience to me. I will absolutely be looking elsewhere to support projects I benefit from.

We don’t intentionally block anyone but we’re looking to see what could be the problem. Thanks for letting us know.

Donations are not a perfect mechanism, there's significant friction.

tea.xyz will not have fees once it goes live with its funding protocol for open-source software.