Collecting donations for 2017. I’ll start with the regular stuff: I regularly donate $10/month to the EFF, $120/year to the FSF, and €180/year to the FSFE.
As for political associations in Switzerland: we are members of Mieterverband (for tenants) and VCS Verkehrs-Club der Schweiz (for sustainable mobility, unlike the Touring-Club, which is pro-cars).
Today I was listening to another near 6h episode of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History and liked it very much: $10.
I’ve been using Mastodon a lot: €10. Usually I don’t donate to Free Software because I also write Free Software and give it away so I feel it evens out.
The Internet Archive keeps our data alive, hopefully preventing the future from viewing our times a Dark Age. So much content on disks and easily lost in an upgrade, deleted when bills aren’t paid, taken offline when key people lose interest, encrypted because of DRM, it’s a sad state of affairs. $25 it is.
I’m not a good Wikipedia editor because whatever I know seems to already be on Wikipedia. It’s amazing. I decided to pay Wikimedia CH CHF 25. I think this is the only one that’s tax deductible, for me.
I want a free alternative to Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer. Thus, even though I don’t agree with all their decisions, I decided to donate €25 to to Mozilla for Firefox. Saving screenshots to the cloud? Integrating Pocket? Noooo!
Most of the links I follow on social media seem to take me to the The Guardian and so I decided to pay them 25€.
Plenty of links I’m following will also lead me to the German news site Golem.de and so I decided to pay their subscription of €30/year.
Also donating to Médécins Sans Frontières and the WWF CHF 500 each. And I pay double subscription for the local leftist weekly newspaper, WOZ, CHF 530 in total.
[Note: recent changes at Patreon result in a different fee structure so I’m not at all sure what this means anymore. As you can see in the comments below, I opened a Liberapay account.]
I understand why people might prefer a Patreon to donations via PayPal: easier to plan for. But $1/mo donations means about $5 out of $12 a year are for the middle men, right? 5% for Patreon, and 3.9% (4.7% to France, 4.9% to Germany) and a fixed fee of 0.30 USD (0.35 EUR, 0.55 CHF) for using PayPal from Switzerland to the US, and a currency conversion fee of 3%, resulting in 0.30 + 0.04 + 0.05 + 0.03 = 0.42, or 5.04 USD per year in fees. Well, if you are supporting multiple creators, I guess the fees get split. And you can prepay your PayPal account. From then on, your PayPal fees go down to 1%. All you need to do is make a domestic bank transfer where your name on the bank account *matches exactly*.
#Life #Donations
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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So much talk about the new fee structures of Patreon these days!
recurring payment service providers
being a money services business
Anyway, I set up an an account on Liberapay and transferred 100€. I’ll support the Mastodon devs and my Mastodon instance’s admin, maybe more.
– Alex Schroeder 2017-12-11 14:57 UTC