After having thought about this for a while, I finally decided to start sponsoring some of the open source projects I regularly use. I set aside a monthly budget and I evenly divided the amount across the projects.
Who am I sponsoring?
So far I’ve started sponsoring these projects / people (in no particular order):
- iTerm2 - a terminal for MacOS I’ve been using for years
- Sebastián Ramírez - author of FastAPI
- Homebrew - a package manager for MacOS
- Cryptomator - a tool to encrypt, decrypt and easily access files in various clouds
- Pallets - they develop and maintain Flask, Click and a few other tools
- Mastodon - the social network I use most
- Atuin - a shell history which supports a few different shells
How much am I donating?
If you were expecting to find an amount, please move to the next paragraph 😅
What I can say is that everyone should donate an amount based on their own possibilities and estabilished budget. If all the users of the projects I mentioned, donated as much as I’m doing, those developers would be rich 😉
How am I donating?
For my own simplicity, I decided to support only projects with a Sponsor page on GitHub. This way I can manage all the donations from a single website. I can decide to adjust the amounts and to sponsor more projects. I don’t want to discriminate anyone, but at the end of the day it’s up to me deciding who to support and how 🤷🏻♂️
Could I do more?
Yes, but… there was a specific thing which prevented me from donating to other projects I wanted to sponsor. These projects (which I won’t mention, but I’ve contacted them in private to suggest considering a more flexible option) all have a minimum amount set in their Sponsor settings.
Honestly I can’t understand the reason for this, and I’m sure it’s not about fees, because GitHub takes a fixed fees percentage (3% credit card processing fee + 3% GitHub service processing fee) so receiving 1$ from 100 people or 100$ from 1 person doesn’t change the final amount of money the developer receives.
My humble suggestion is to remove the minimum amount: not everyone can or is willing to donate the minimum amount some of these projects have set and you will be able to collect more donations from more people.
Conclusion
My personal opinion is that every cent counts. No matter if you can only afford 5$/month or if you are able to donate 100$/month: every person should donate based on their own preferences and possibilities.
I onestly would prefer to get 1$ from 100 different people than 100$ from a single person. A larger number of people believing in my projects is more important than the final amount.
So, if you really care about open source, beware that GitHub stars can’t be used to pay the bills 😉 please consider donating to the projects you love as much as you can!