The “anonymity” of donations has been a cornerstone of Liberapay since its launch, and it’s a characteristic that sets Liberapay apart from almost every other platform. Hiding the identity of the donor from the recipient is often a good thing, both for privacy and to preserve the unconditional nature of the donation, but in some cases it is undesirable. In particular, it prevents creators from thanking their patrons by name.

So, starting today, creators can enable their patrons to donate non-anonymously. The implementation isn’t perfect yet, but it will be improved over time. As always, you can contact us if you encounter a problem or have something else to say.

The rest of this blog post is split into two parts, one focused on donors and another on creators, but reading both is recommended.

Donors

If you’re a donor, please go to your Giving page and click on one of the three buttons that should appear near the top. Think carefully, you won’t see those buttons again after clicking one of them.

If you choose to make your donations public, then you may see a message inviting you to fill your public profile, because a public donation is rather pointless if your public profile is empty.

The information you put in your public profile is the only data that Liberapay will provide to the beneficiaries of your donations. Liberapay won’t expose your legal name, email address or any other private information that you provide during payment. (However, PayPal does show your name and email address to the recipient, so there are still warnings about that in the payment pages.)

If you have any active public donations, they will be visible on your profile:

If you don’t want to publish the amounts of your donations, go to your profile Privacy settings, check the “Do not publish the amounts of money I send” box, and don’t forget to click on the “Save” button.

Creators

If you’re a creator, please go to the new “Patrons” page and click on one of the two buttons at the top, to opt in or out of seeing who your patrons are.

If you enable non-anonymous donations, then you will be able to download a list of your patrons in CSV format, and the list of your public patrons will be available on your profile page. Of course, these lists only contain the pseudonyms of donors who have opted-in, not the legal names of all donors.

Once you’ve enabled non-anonymous donations, new donors will be asked to choose a visibility level for their donations.

If you’ve only connected a PayPal account in your “Payment Processors” page, then the “Secret donation” option won’t appear, because you have access to the names and email addresses of donors through PayPal.

In the near future, it will be possible to enable or disable any of the three visibility levels. This will allow disabling the “Private” level if it doesn’t really make sense for you. However, PayPal-only recipients still won’t be able to enable secret donations.

In the long term, having support for non-anonymous payments could lead to other features. For example, some donations through Liberapay could become tax-deductible. However, we currently don’t have plans to implement features that would allow sending rewards to patrons. Liberapay is still a donation platform, not a paywall provider.

Lifting the veil of anonymity was originally published in Liberapay’s Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What’s changed

There hasn’t been any major change since the deployment of automatic renewals last year, but many smaller things have been fixed or improved. Here is a list of some of those changes:

• A dedicated Privacy page has been created, and several other pages and notifications have been improved to clarify various things.
• The accessibility of the Liberapay website has been improved for people who use screen readers.
• The maximum payment amounts have been increased for confirmed donors, to facilitate larger contributions from businesses. (#1919)
• Descriptions have been added to the payments that creators see in their Stripe accounts. (#1913)
• The ability to prevent others from pledging has been removed, but people who can’t or don’t want to use Liberapay can still “opt out”. (#1881)
• The barriers that prevented connecting multiple accounts of the same social platform to a Liberapay profile have been lifted. (#1787)

Additionally, Stripe became available in six more European countries: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czechia, Hungary, Malta, and Romania. The creators in those countries can connect a Stripe account to make it easier for their patrons to support them.

What’s been the same

Liberapay’s growth rate has been steady in 2020: the number of active users and the sum of donations have more than doubled again this year.

What’s next

The implementation of new features is currently on pause as I am attempting to migrate the Liberapay website and its database from Amazon servers in Ireland to OVH in France (#1727). However, I’m hoping that at least one big feature will be implemented later this year.

What you can do

Liberapay’s development could be faster if a second Python developer joined the team, but we’ve never had enough income to properly remunerate two developers, so make sure that you’re donating to the Liberapay team if you have the means.

That’s all for today, thank you for reading.

The fifth year of Liberapay was originally published in Liberapay’s Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Automatic renewals are finally here!

In last year’s post we said we were working on “the possibility to have your donations be renewed automatically”. Well, it took way longer than we had hoped, but it’s finally done. 😌

This feature is very new and still rough around the edges. For example the automatic renewal only works with Stripe, not with PayPal. Nevertheless we’re hopeful that it will satisfy many donors and help stabilize the incomes of creators. Of course we’ll keep working to improve it.

If you’re a donor, go check out your new “Payment Schedule” page. If you want to turn on automatic renewals for all your donations, go to your “Giving” page and click on the “Yes, activate automatic renewals” button at the top.

Recap of other changes

Grouped payments

The other improvement we mentioned in last year’s blog post was the possibility to fund donations to multiple creators with a single payment. This has been implemented on our side, in several steps throughout the year, but it’s still limited to a small subset of recipients due to the limitations of the underlying payment processors (Stripe and PayPal). In the last month approximately 10% of payments had more than one recipient.

Multiple payment instruments

Donors can now see and manage their connected cards and bank accounts in the new “Payment Instruments” page, and select any of them during payment.

Receipts

When we first migrated to the new payment processors we didn’t immediately update the donation receipt generator, so for a while there were no receipts for new payments. This shortcoming was fixed in June. You can find the links to your receipts in the your account’s ledger.

Visual tweaks

We changed the orientation of several navigation elements from horizontal to vertical in order to make room for more pages and at the same time improve how the Liberapay website adapts to different screen sizes.

More countries

This improvement isn’t our doing, but it’s good news: creators in Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia can now connect a Stripe account (which allows their donors to pay “directly”, without having to go through PayPal). If your country still isn’t supported by Stripe, you can preregister to let them know that you’re interested and be notified as soon as they launch in your country.

Growth

At the beginning of 2019 Liberapay was still suffering from 2018’s crisis, however we’ve successfully bounced back: both the number of active users and the sum of donations have more than doubled in the past year.

Future

Liberapay is far from perfect, we still have many things to fix and improve, and several big features to implement. For example we know that some creators would like to be able to send updates to their donors, and customize the donation form, and see who their patrons are so they can thank them.

Getting all that done requires a lot of work, so please donate if you can, and contribute in kind if you have the necessary skills and time. We need developers to improve Liberapay’s core, writers to expand our documentation, and polyglots to translate Liberapay.

Thank you for reading. Have a great year. 💛

The fourth year of Liberapay was originally published in Liberapay’s Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A difficult year

In July our payment “partner” decided to kick us and our users out of their platform. If you haven’t done so already you may want read our two previous blog posts about this ordeal: “Liberapay is in trouble” and “Liberapay status update”.

We still haven’t fully recovered from this crisis, but since our last blog post we have been able to bring back the SEPA Direct Debit payment method.

We want to thank all the people who supported us through this difficult year, including everyone who kept donating through Liberapay regardless of the transient difficulties in doing so.

A good year?

Paradoxically 2018 was also our best year yet if we consider the volume of donations processed, thanks to the fast growth of December 2017 and early 2018. In total we transferred approximately €109k to 700 creators in 2018, that’s 4 times more money than in 2017 and twice the number of recipients.

Improvements

It feels like we’ve spent most of 2018 trying to keep Liberapay in working order instead of improving it, but in fact the platform has gotten better in the past year.

33 currencies!

Having to rebuild large chunks of Liberapay to work with different payment processors has been a pain and has hindered progress in other areas, but it has also enabled us to greatly improve our support of currencies.

When Liberapay launched in 2016 its only currency was the Euro, then in 2017 we added the US dollar, and in 2018 we added support for 31 additional currencies: the Australian Dollar (AUD), Bulgarian Lev (BGN), Brazilian Real (BRL), Canadian Dollar (CAD), Swiss Franc (CHF), Chinese Yuan (CNY), Czech Koruna (CZK), Danish Krone (DKK), British Pound (GBP), Hong Kong Dollar (HKD), Croatian Kuna (HRK), Hungarian Forint (HUF), Indonesian Rupiah (IDR), Israeli New Shekel (ILS), Indian Rupee (INR), Icelandic Króna (ISK), Japanese Yen (JPY), South Korean Won (KRW), Mexican Peso (MXN), Malaysian Ringgit (MYR), Norwegian Krone (NOK), New Zealand Dollar (NZD), Philippine Piso (PHP), Polish Zloty (PLN), Romanian Leu (RON), Russian Ruble (RUB), Swedish Krona (SEK), Singapore Dollar (SGD), Thai Baht (THB), Turkish Lira (TRY), South African Rand (ZAR).

You should update your currency preferences if you haven’t done it yet. Below is a copy of the two paragraphs located at the bottom of that page:

Accepting foreign currencies can increase your income by convincing people in other countries to donate to you, but international payments usually result in a higher percentage of fees, and fluctuations in exchange rates can lessen the stability of your income.

Stripe automatically converts funds into your main currency, but by default PayPal holds payments in foreign currencies until you tell it what to do. If you have a Business PayPal account you can choose to automatically convert all incoming payments in foreign currencies to your main currency. This option is currently located in the “Preferences for receiving payments” page.

Better profile settings

Over time the profile settings had become a confusing mess, we fixed that in April by splitting them into multiple tabs. We also improved the responsiveness of a few elements at the same time.

Security alerts

In March we implemented a new feature to help you keep your account secure: when you set a new password or log in with your current one we automatically check it against the world’s biggest public list of leaked passwords, and warn you if we find a match.

Sadly we’re still missing support for two-factor authentication (#926).

More public data

Liberapay’s Explore section has been expanded to provide more visibility into who is using the platform.

Roadmap

We don’t have a strict roadmap, but there are a lot of things we want to improve and a lot of new features we want to implement. Lately we’ve been working on these two important changes:

• The possibility to send money to multiple creators at once instead of having to make multiple payments, when this kind of one-to-many payment is supported by the underlying payment processor.
• The possibility to have your donations be renewed automatically. This long-awaited feature should make Liberapay much more convenient for donors and help stabilize the income of creators.

One of the reasons why progress has been somewhat slow in 2018 is that Liberapay is still shorthanded and underfunded, so please donate or contribute if you can. Having a second Python developer working on Liberapay’s core could be particularly beneficial, however programming skills aren’t required to contribute to Liberapay. For example improving the documentation or completing the translations can be equally useful.

Thank you for reading, we wish you peace and long life. 🖖

The third year of Liberapay was originally published in Liberapay’s Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Three months ago we announced that Liberapay was in trouble. Since then we’ve been working on adapting the platform to work with other payment service providers, and today we’re finally ready to announce that Liberapay now supports two separate payment processors: Stripe and PayPal.

What you need to do

If you use Liberapay to receive donations: you need to connect at least one Stripe or PayPal account, otherwise donations to you cannot be processed. If both Stripe and PayPal are available in your country then we recommend setting up both.

If you’re a donor: you don’t have to do anything right now. You will automatically receive a notification when it’s time to renew your donations. Note: the page to manage your donations has been redesigned to fit how Liberapay works now, and also to fit small screens.

How Liberapay works now

As stated in our previous blog post the way donations are processed needed to evolve for Liberapay to be able to survive and grow. This announcement caused some confusion and worry, so here’s an attempt to better explain the change.

In the past when a user wanted to donate they were asked to add money into their “wallet”, and once the money had arrived it was transferred little by little every Wednesday to the donation recipient(s). This created a very long delay (sometimes years) between when the donor sent the money and when the beneficiary actually received all of it. During that time the money stayed idle in Mangopay wallets, not being useful to anyone.

Now the entire amount of a payment goes immediately to the Stripe or PayPal account of the recipient, there are no more wallets. However, the donations are still recurrent: the amount of money sent still corresponds to a specific number of weeks and the donor is still notified when it’s time to renew the donation.

Let’s take an example: Alice wants to donate $1 per week to Bob, and she decides to send $12 for her first payment. In the old system the money would have gone into her Mangopay wallet, then every Wednesday $1 would have been transferred from that wallet to Bob’s wallet, until there wasn’t any money left in Alice’s wallet. In the new system the $12 go directly to the Stripe or PayPal account of Bob, and every week Liberapay subtracts $1 from the amount that Alice has paid in advance, until that number reaches zero. In both systems Alice receives an email notification after 12 weeks reminding her that it’s time to pay again, and Bob receives an email every week informing him that his “income” is $1, even though in the new system Bob actually receives the $12 on the first week instead of $1 payments every week.

If Alice decides to modify the amount of her donation, then the date of the next payment changes accordingly. For example, if immediately after paying she increases her donation to $2 per week, then the renewal will be 6 weeks later instead of 12. However, if Alice decides to stop the donation she will not automatically receive a refund of the money she has paid in advance, because this isn’t implemented yet. If you stop a donation and you would like a refund please contact us.

A big shortcoming of the new system is that every donation has to be paid separately, which can be quite annoying if you have many of them. We’re planning to tackle this problem in two different ways: by avoiding it whenever possible (Stripe and PayPal both have partial support for doing multiple payments at once), and by making it easier to manage the multiple payments when we can’t bundle them all together. The latter involves helping the donor to schedule the payments in an optimal way, then either executing them automatically (if desired and possible) or simply notifying the donor when it’s time.

Another important issue is that PayPal payments are currently not anonymous, the donor and the recipient can see each other’s email address. We may be able to fix that in the future, it depends on getting approval from PayPal.

Finally, a drawback of abandoning wallets is that Liberapay’s team system relied heavily on them. We’ve been able to make donations to teams work again, but only in a simplistic way: when a donor wants to send money to a team our software selects one of the team’s members to receive it, whereas ideally the payment should be split into multiple transfers so that every member receives its share. This shortcoming means that some members can receive more money than they should, although over time the disparity should tend to disappear as new payments are received by the other team members.

Status of Mangopay

We disabled adding money to a wallet on July 19th, and stopped processing transfers between wallets on August 21st. However, withdrawing money to a bank account is still possible. As of today €23.6k and $2.6k remain stored in 640 wallets. You may want to check your wallet.

Thanks to the donors who followed the recommendation in our previous blog post, a total of €37k and $5.8k was donated in advance, thus greatly reducing the short term impact of the Mangopay crisis on the available income of creators. Unfortunately €16.8k and $8k were refunded to donors instead, either by choice or by inaction (on August 25th we refunded as much of what was left in the wallets of donors as possible). Hopefully at least some of that money was donated in other ways.

About Stripe and PayPal

Stripe and PayPal are both payment services that can be used without Liberapay, whereas Mangopay accounts cannot be accessed directly by their owners and aren’t shared between platforms. This big difference means that if you were to stop using Liberapay you would still be able to receive payments through Stripe and PayPal in other ways.

Stripe is a payment service designed to help businesses collect payments from their customers easily and securely. On Liberapay it allows donors to pay by card directly from our website, whereas PayPal payments require redirecting the donor to PayPal’s website. Stripe also supports other payment methods in addition to cards, the one we’re currently working on is the SEPA Direct Debit, which as you may know we used to support through Mangopay.

Stripe’s biggest flaw is that it only supports sending money to a relatively small number of countries (less than 30), so some of our users cannot use it. This is one of the reasons why we also support PayPal, which operates pretty much worldwide (more than 200 countries).

While it is sad that Stripe isn’t more global, at least they’re clear about which countries they support, whereas Mangopay wasn’t clear at all and even silently dropped support for countries they had users in! Liberapay will work much better outside of Europe now that we use Stripe and PayPal instead of Mangopay, and we will be able to support many more currencies in the future.

Conclusion

Liberapay is recovering, but it will take at least several more months before everything is fully operational again.

Liberapay status update was originally published in Liberapay’s Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The first two sections of this blog post are about what you should do as a Liberapay user. Mangopay may cut us off as soon as July 26th, so don’t wait too long. The last section is about how Liberapay is going to change and improve in response to this crisis.

What you should do if you’re a donor

If you use Liberapay as a donor, please go to the new page titled “Emptying your wallet” and choose one of the two options. Here is a screenshot of that page:

The first choice is better if you wish to continue using Liberapay. It distributes all the money from your wallet to the people who would have normally received it over time. Our software has been modified to record this kind of operation properly, in particular the recipients will see that this sudden burst of income corresponds to multiple weeks of donations.

For example, if you’re donating $1 per week to 2 creators, and you have $40 in your wallet, then each creator will receive $20, and 20 weeks from now you’ll receive our usual email reminding you that it’s time to add money again.

Please note that the disbursement may fail for various reasons. We will be monitoring errors and trying to fix them, but in some cases the problem will be on the recipient side, for example someone who hasn’t filled the identity form or a team that hasn’t defined how the income should be split between the members.

What you can do if you receive donations on Liberapay

Withdraw your income from your Liberapay wallet to your bank account like you usually do. You may want to wait a week to give your patrons a chance to transfer the remaining of their donations from their wallets to yours.

We’ll inform you as soon as the integration of a new payment processor is complete, and tell you if there’s anything you need to do to start receiving donations again on Liberapay.

If you’re a member of a team, you should make sure that your take is set and up-to-date. You can do that from your “Receiving” page.

Why this is happening

Mangopay hasn’t provided a detailed explanation of their decision, so we’re not sure. We’ve tried to understand their concerns, they seemed related to the fact that Liberapay is open to everyone, so we proposed to review every user and block any potentially problematic account, but they rejected this proposal, saying that it’s too late for that.

To be clear, Mangopay never warned us that something was wrong and that they would terminate our contract if we didn’t right that wrong. We also didn’t expect them to end the contract so abruptly without following the normal procedure that would have given us until the end of the year to migrate elsewhere.

How Liberapay is going to come out of this better

Even before Mangopay informed us of their decision to kick us out we knew that Liberapay had to evolve in order to survive.

The number of donors on Liberapay has grown so much in the last 6 months that a design flaw in our platform has become apparent. We built Liberapay on the assumption that processing lots of small money transfers every week is okay when there are no fees, but we were wrong.

To illustrate why it’s not viable, imagine receiving bank account statements more than 50 pages long every month. That is basically what would happen if we sent a monthly account statement to a Liberapay user who has hundreds of patrons.

In addition to the problems caused by the sheer number of transactions, the processing of donations over time also requires holding the donors’ funds in their “wallets”, often for many weeks. This way of doing things severely limits the number of payment processors we can use, because few of them can provide this kind of wallet.

So, we’re changing our approach of recurrent donations. Instead of distributing them weekly we’re going to distribute them as soon as the money arrives. For example, instead of disbursing a payment of €26 for a weekly donation of €0.50 as 52 weekly transfers of €0.50, we’ll do a single transfer of €26 and inform the recipient that it corresponds to “52 weeks of €0.50”.

With this new approach Liberapay will scale a lot better, the platform will be able to handle a very large number of donations without crumbling under its own weight.

Aside from this, Liberapay will also become a more global platform. We’ve learned the hard way that Mangopay isn’t very good at handling payments outside Europe, and now that we have a better understanding of the world’s payment infrastructure we’ll choose our payment processors more carefully.

If you’d like to follow or contribute to our work on migrating away from Mangopay you can do so in this GitHub issue.

Liberapay is in trouble was originally published in Liberapay’s Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Highlights of the past year

2017 was a busy and eventful year.

During the first quarter we moved our servers to Europe, and implemented “expense reimbursements”. This private feature will become available to all organizations on Liberapay in 2018.

In the second quarter of the year the rise of the Mastodon social network had a significant impact on us. We created our account in April, then a month later we implemented linking a Mastodon account to a Liberapay profile (as well as pledging to Mastodon users who haven’t joined Liberapay yet). Another month later, the Mastodon team joined Liberapay! These events are great examples of two open source projects supporting each other, spontaneously and independently (we didn’t ask each other to do what we did).

In June we implemented listing GitHub and GitLab.com repositories on Liberapay profiles.

In July, Liberapay was presented at the Libre Software Meeting. Around the same time the Matrix project joined Liberapay, and a week later the webcomic creator David Revoy announced his Liberapay account.

In August we added Twitch and Youtube to the platforms that Liberapay can interact with.

In September we added a new payment method: direct debits! This is currently only available to users in the euro area, but hopefully our payment processors will support more countries in the future.

The final quarter of 2017 was very intense. In early October we learned that Gratipay, the US-based platform from which Liberapay was forked, would shut down at the end of the year. At the time Liberapay only supported one currency (the euro), but with the end of Gratipay we decided to add support for the US dollar. This was a lot of work in a very short time, but we were able to get it roughly done in time for the official announcement of Gratipay’s shutdown. You can read our announcement to learn more about our currencies on Liberapay:

Liberapay now supports US dollars

In December another platform, Patreon, had a big impact on Liberapay. They announced a modification of their platform’s fee structure, which was criticized by almost everyone. Eventually they canceled their plan, but for several days many patrons dropped or reduced their pledges, and the traffic on Liberapay surged as people looked into alternatives to Patreon. In a week the volume of donations on Liberapay jumped by 50%. We spent a lot of time answering questions and support requests in December as a result of this “Patreon feeasco”.

Other improvements

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of other changes we pushed in 2017:

• A new look for profile pages and lists of profiles.
• Better profile metadata so that links posted on social networks create nice boxes showing avatar+title+description.
• Revamped donation forms.
• Nicer input of payment card details.
• New homepage sections to explain how the platform works and expose its top features.
• Custom amounts when adding money to fund one’s donations, and improved form when withdrawing one’s earnings.
• Possibility of changing the “type” of an account from “individual” to “organization” or vice versa.
• Creation of a redirection when an account’s name (and thus its URL) is modified, and implementation of name changes for team accounts.
• Proper cancellation of bank wires for donors who change their mind about using this payment method.

Translations

Our translators worked hard in 2017, and thanks to them Liberapay is currently fully available in 12 languages, with 6 others above 50%! Reminder: you can contribute.

Growth

The number of active users on Liberapay has grown almost tenfold since last year, and the volume of donations has jumped eightfold!

Forward!

In last year’s anniversary post we said that we were going to “keep improving Liberapay”. We did exactly that, albeit not always in the areas we were aiming for. Of course we’re going to continue this year. There’s still plenty to do, from adding more documentation to supporting more currencies, from improving the donation form to facilitating team management, from fixing bugs to preventing future ones…

The new features we’re planning to land in 2018 include: automatic payments (to save time for donors and increase income stability for creators), the possibility to download good account statements, more options to customize one’s profile, new ways to distribute money inside a collective.

We hope you’ll support us in our endeavor to make Liberapay even better, and we wish you all a great and happy year!

You have questions or feedback? Contact us / You like the platform we’re building? Follow us.

The second year of Liberapay was originally published in Liberapay’s Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We hadn’t planned to work on this in 2017, but when we heard that Gratipay was going to shut down at the end of the year we decided to step up. After three weeks of intense work we managed to implement basic support for the US dollar, as well as a tool to help Gratipay users migrate their accounts to Liberapay!

Modifying a platform like ours to handle multiple currencies is no small task, and if you enjoy Git stats you’ll be interested to know that this initial work totaled 38 commits, 97 files changed, 2261 insertions, and 1161 deletions. It’s one of the biggest changes to Liberapay’s source code since the service was launched in February 2016.

How does it work?

Every Liberapay account now has a “main” currency, as well as a toggle which determines whether donations in other currencies are accepted or rejected (the latter is the default).

Accepting foreign currencies can complicate things for you, but rejecting them can discourage some donors; the choice is yours. Of course a big factor to consider is whether your patrons are spread out around the world or concentrated in the same currency area as you.

Limitations

Our support of multiple currencies is still a work in progress:

• We currently don’t support currency conversion, so you can’t convert your earnings before withdrawing them to your bank account. We know from experience that sending euros to a US account doesn’t always work, for example. To alleviate these problems we’re thinking of implementing automatic fee-less currency swapping inside Liberapay.
• Teams are limited to a single currency, and it’s not possible to change it if the team is already receiving donations. These are temporary technical limitations. (Edit on March 18, 2018: teams can now receive donations in multiple currencies.)
• Our payment processors don’t yet support the full range of payment methods used in the US, for example American Express cards and ACH (US direct debits) are still missing. This should improve over time, but it may take a while.

What about all the other currencies?

Our payment partner currently supports 9 other currencies which could be added to Liberapay: the British pound (GBP), the Canadian dollar (CAD), the Swedish krona (SEK), the Norwegian krone (NOK), the Danish krone (DKK), the Swiss franc (CHF), the South African rand (ZAR), the Polish złoty (PLN), and the Australian dollar (AUD). Please reach out to us if you’re interested in receiving donations in one of these currencies.

We do not support crypto-currencies, and we’re not planning to change that anytime soon.

Do I need to do something?

If you prefer euros and don’t want to accept dollars then you don’t need to do anything. If you prefer dollars, or if you’d like to allow your patrons to send you dollars even though you prefer euros, then you should modify your profile settings.

If you only use Liberapay to donate money, not to receive it, then there’s not much you can do at this point. Please be patient while creators decide how they want to handle foreign currencies, and while we work on polishing the patron side of that.

Finally, if you don’t have an account yet then you should sign up of course!

You have questions or feedback? Contact us / You like the platform we’re building? Follow us and support our work.

Liberapay now supports US dollars was originally published in Liberapay’s Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Retrospective

A lot has happened during our first year!

Let’s start with the bad: just 3 months after we launched we started getting complaints about controversial people using our platform. We found no legal basis to kick them out, but our payment processor doesn’t care about that, so eventually they ordered us to ban the most problematic user, who was our biggest one at the time, and to refund all the money he had received. Of course we weren’t ready for that, our accounting system didn’t even have the concept of a “refund”. By the end of the summer all the payments had been refunded, but this whole ordeal cost us weeks of work and affected morale for a while.

Fortunately many positive things happened too.

Firstly, the launch of Liberapay went well and our user base has been growing slowly but steadily since the beginning (if we ignore the bump generated by the controversial user and his fans). Moreover, we’ve received contributions from quite a few people: a lot of translations, a little code, a nice logo, some good ideas, etc.

On the fun side there are the two events where Liberapay was represented. The first one was a gathering in Lille where I (Charly C.) met Chad Whitacre, Xavier Damman, Lionel Dricot, and many other interesting people.

The second one was in November: we presented Liberapay on stage for the first time, in Toulouse. Many thanks to the organizers of Capitole du Libre for this opportunity. If you understand French you can watch the video or read the slides.

Capitole du Libre on Twitter

Conférence @liberapaye la plateforme libre de dons récurrents en B00 #CDL2016

Aside from all that we’ve also made quite a few improvements to the Liberapay service, of course, although not as many as we’d hoped. Here’s a list of tweets from us announcing new features, in chronological order:

Liberapay on Twitter

Did you know that Liberapay is available in multiple languages? Well, we now have language subdomains, e.g. https://t.co/RXfZpcbngI #i18n

Liberapay on Twitter

It's now possible to connect your @gitlab account to your Liberapay profile. Example: https://t.co/JJJMad3KVb :-) #GitLab #OpenSource

Liberapay on Twitter

It's now possible to change your avatar on https://t.co/S4BshQt9lK, and your teams' avatars too! :-)

Liberapay on Twitter

Have you noticed that you can now fund your donations by bank wire? It's much cheaper than credit cards.

Liberapay on Twitter

We've just made it easier to donate for the first time by removing the email verification step. :-) Thanks to @mangopay for allowing that.

Liberapay on Twitter

Good news: https://t.co/S4BshQbxXa is now fully available in 6 new languages: Dutch, Esperanto, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish :-)

Liberapay on Twitter

Good news: signing up to donate on https://t.co/S4BshQbxXa is now easier, you no longer need to provide a username and password. :-)

Liberapay on Twitter

We now have basic support for monthly and yearly donation amounts! (Transfers still happen weekly, amounts are converted automatically.)

Liberapay on Twitter

To kick off 2017 we've greatly improved the page that displays your transaction history! Check out yours: https://t.co/P0gfInmW9Z

(Note that this list isn’t complete, and of course it doesn’t mention features that we implemented before the launch.)

The future

In 2017 we’re going to keep improving Liberapay. We have no shortage of things to do! The next big feature will probably be newsletters (part of the work is already done). Other big things on the horizon include: a total giving amount, multiple funding goals, improving our terms of service, SEPA direct debits. The biggest undertaking would probably be to add support for multiple currencies, I don’t know if we’ll be able to do it this year.

Don’t hesitate to tell us which features you care most about, we sometimes pick what to work on next based on feedback. However, please remember that implementing new features is a lot of work, so if you want it to happen you should also help pay for it.

Have a good year everyone!

You have questions or feedback? Contact us / You like our service? Follow us / You’re interested in contributing to Liberapay? Come introduce yourself / You’d like to help but don’t have time? Donate

The First Year of Liberapay was originally published in Liberapay’s Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Collecting money

Many projects have trouble with the fundraising itself.

A big reason is that there are psychological barriers on both sides (the open source projects on one hand, and their users on the other).

In the eyes of many people donations are not a valid business model. To some of them it even feels like begging. Our answer to that is simple: seeking donations isn’t asking for charity, it’s more like allowing the customer to choose the price of the service. It’s pay what you want, and there’s nothing wrong with it, in some ways it’s even better than other pricing schemes.

On top of that, a few questions often go through someone’s mind when they’re asked to donate. Why pay for something I already have for free? Why should I fund this when others don’t? Is my money going to be wasted? How much should I give? These are all valid questions that need to be addressed.

Liberapay can help overcome some of the obstacles that stop people from donating. For example, we have “standard” donation amounts to help users who don’t know how much to give. We also provide visibility into how much everyone receives (except users who opt-out), and we’re planning to help creators tell donors about the work their money funded, because we believe that transparency and accountability are two key ingredients.

Corporate sponsors are another important piece of the puzzle, as they can make bigger contributions than individuals. Like the creator of Open Collective recently noted, a good way to convince businesses (and nonprofits) to give back to the projects they rely on is to offer them visibility in return, by publicly thanking them, on the project’s website and in its README. Unfortunately the anonymity of donations on Liberapay is currently preventing our users from thanking their donors, we’re going to fix that.

We’ve also identified another hurdle: information circulates badly in the open source community, especially when it comes to money. There’s no social network you can use that will keep you updated on which projects need funding. To address this issue we’re trying to build communities, to bring people together and keep them informed through newsletters (those aren’t operational yet).

Distributing the funds

So you’ve found people to support your work, great, now what? Any sizeable project has multiple contributors, and determining who should get how much is a big challenge.

To solve it we’ve come up with an innovative way to distribute donations to contributors: a team system that allows members of a project to share income, without having to set up a legal entity, and without creating resentment.

The basic principle is very simple: each member decides every week how much of the team’s income they take! We call that “take-what-you-want” remuneration. There is no hierarchy, not even an owner with special powers. The amounts are public, so everyone can see how much each team member is taking.

This might sound crazy, but it actually works, and since every member “votes” on how to share the money, the repartition is reasonably fair and resentment is minimal.

To bypass the need for a legal entity, the money goes directly from the donors to the team’s members. As team accounts never actually hold any money, not even for a split second, they don’t need to have a legal existence.

We’re not saying that this system is perfect, it might have legal issues that we haven’t anticipated, and it may prove to be impractical in many cases, but the only way to know for sure is to try, so that’s what we’re doing.

Why don’t you join us?

You have questions or feedback? Contact us / You like our project? Follow us / You’re interested in working on Liberapay’s code? It’s on GitHub / You’d like to help but don’t have time? Donate

A new platform to fund work on open source projects was originally published in Liberapay’s Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.