Donate Less(blogs.gnome.org)
29 pointsby edenta day ago8 comments
  • ncrucesa day ago
    Same logic applies to all subscriptions.

    This may look fine when it's one sub.

    But then you're spending hundreds of €$£ a month on stuff and need to go through a list of dozens of things to figure out which you should continue paying for.

    So no. I will continue to donate randomly to stuff, and limit subscriptions to a handful I can mentally keep track of. I'm sorry.

    PS: I like, and very much respect, how Kagi handles subscriptions. Not gonna work for donations, but I wish more services handled things that way.

  • petercoopera day ago
    The argument is totally sound for comparing lump sum versus regular donations, but if the option comes down to $200 lump sum vs nothing, the lump sum wins.

    95% of my donations to various things are lump sums as I've proven prone to losing track of subscriptions, so it's good to retain the option (as GNOME has). It can also be a lot simpler to make one-off donations as a company for accounting reasons.

  • joshstrangea day ago
    > We would vastly prefer you donate $10/mo for one year ($120 total) than $200 in one lump sum. That’s counter-intuitive, so let me explain.

    For a long time now I've wanted to build a donation subscription management service. A sort of "Set how much you want to donate a month and allocate it to charities of your choice". Tools to let you do %, flat $, "whatever isn't allocated, allocate to this charity", etc. And things like an easy way to re-route your giving to a crisis for a period of time (one-time, x-months, ongoing).

    Most non-profits have really rough donation portals (UI/UX) and having to log into 5-10+ portals to manage your giving is annoying. Also, I think a number of people are overwhelmed by giving, as in they don't know where to start. Giving them an easy way to manage it in 1 place and protecting them from getting spammed (unless they opt-in to get "updates") seems like a win.

    • saulpw20 hours ago
      Why only for donations? What about for all subscription services?

      For this I use privacy.com, to give each 'vendor' its own unique credit card number, with a monthly/annual/lifetime limit. I can review all my recent expenses and open cards, and close or pause them whenever I like. This system just caught an 8% price increase by my ISP, which meant it was rejected before I was charged, and I was able to call and negotiate it down (20%!).

      Not affiliated with privacy.com, just a happy customer. I give up my credit card points on subscriptions, in exchange for peace of mind and finer-grained control over my finances.

      • joshstrange18 hours ago
        Well, managing subscriptions for other services requires something like privacy.com (personally not for me, not saying it can't work for others but I'm not a fan of that style) whereas charitable donations can be "proxied" without needing (research needed) needing each organizations approval/integration.

        I always imagined non-profits would be easier since they just want the money, they don't /need/ to know who gave it for purposes of providing services. Maybe they want it for records/marketing but some of that I'm not a fan of. Just because I gave/give you $5/mo you don't have a right to sell my info or spam me with other things. This service (that I'm imagining in my head) would not hand over more info than needed, giving you a firewall between you and the charity. Easy to give, easy to stop giving, no spam, no guilt trip, no selling of your info. At least that would be the goal.

  • kristianpa day ago
    How can I donate to the KDE desktop project? Gnome's UI has no sense to it at all. Look at gedit, it has three menus including one hamburger menu. Just do a menu bar, people!
  • ValdikSSa day ago
    For my projects, I prefer to collect the money for the whole year operation in advance. This allows me not to refer to subscription model, yet not to ask for donations every month.
  • a day ago
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  • abnercoimbrea day ago
    Now that's what I call an effective fundraising campaign. Indeed, small monthly donors feel more stable than large, one-off checks (even if, in theory, the latter is larger than the former.)
  • a day ago
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