[acolytic]

One thing I'm not seeing here is people giving freely simply because you created something they value. You will never become a billionaire through this mechanism but I suspect you can probably earn a decent living.

The problem with this mechanism is that now each project is out on their own to advertise their needs and get donations. I'm actually experimenting in this space with SeedAndDew (https://www.seedanddew.com). My hypothesis is that if you can give people the ability to set a specific amount to open source that automatically goes to the right places, more people will contribute. Just went full-time to see this through so early days but I'm optimistic.

[soulbadguy]

Are the donations tax deductible ? How did you guys arrive at the 30% figure ? Seems quite high to me

[acolytic]

Donations are not tax-deductible for now. We might do that later if people ask for it.

30% includes all payment processing costs and other costs for both users and projects, so there is a flat 70% remaining for projects that doesn't get deducted further. We do this to keep things simple and make it clear how much projects can get.

Payment processing alone costs $0.3 + 3% with Stripe, so at $10/month that's a fixed $0.6 out of the $3 we take. The other $2.4 needs to accommodate the fees to send money to each of the projects + infrastructure costs. Not sure how to account for that but assuming at scale around $0.4/user/month, we're looking at $2/user/month in profit. Assuming sustainability is reached at $200,000, that is approximately 8300 people giving to open source through this. That is high but seems approachable.

Does that seem reasonable? My objective with this is to build something that increases the pool of people who contribute but also ensure the underlying project can stay afloat indefinitely with the right incentives.