I’ve got some standing orders of 1 or 2 euros every month for bigger projects like grapheneos and kde. And for small apps that I actively use, I try to donate 5 or 10 euros now and then. It’s not much but I believe if everyone is doing their part we succeed in the long run
I live by rule “if everyone gave me 1 euro…” so I donate 1 euro/month to projects I use often (but I send actually 12/year to spare the devs some trx costs) and 1 euro/year to projects that I use sometimes (again I send 5 Eur/5 years actually). I use almost only open source and I haven’t yet paid everyone. I also recently made an open source application where I didn’t setup any donations channel, I simply like doing it… Maybe in the future if I have more work on it, but not now…
Not as much as I should be tbh.
Change that, it’s the only way there projects will survive.
I second everyone donating a little would keep their favorite projects healthy. As a guy I follow says, the small donation is the one that didn’t come.
Also answering your question, I usually pay the minimum tier to not get stretched thin and go broke. 🥲
I donate 25€ per month to Droidian. It uses the Android kernel to run a Debian based Linux distro on phones.
Though I would rather see mainline Linux on phones succeed, I believe this could be the best alternative to iOS / Android (OS) until that happens.
Every month about 10-20 euro, but nothing recurring. I setup a list of my open source tools and I try to one at a time donate to each one. But its a slow process and feels too less, but I don’t want to do recurring ones, though I know it would be the best for the projects.
None because I’m barely managing to avoid homelessness each month if I made more then I would do so though.
No problem we each do what we can in this hard world.
When one of my “cloud” devices / services becomes “enshittified”, I’ll donate what the provide is asking to a related open source self-hosted project.
I also “buy” the major update for whatever software I use regularly.
1$/month to every project I frequently use via Liberapay.
Somewhere between $10 and $50 per transaction. Its not every month, but just randomly throughout the year depending on what I have.
Nothing because I literally have no money
I don’t have “literally no money” but yeah I’m in the same boat. Used to donate but with the price of everything going up the last couple of years, it’s drained any and all discretionary spending…
Look on a price comparison site. Most of the bill increases are due to the loyalty tax.
huh?
Companies always give their best deals to new customers. You are likely paying way higher than market rate for your bills.
That’s not the issue, I promise.
The annual KDE reminder works on me. I also donate yearly to thunderbird and other random foss projects that are important to me like pihole. I pay for bitwarden to support them while keeping an instance of vaultwarden running as backup.
The other thing I try to do in lieu of donating is turning on metrics for applications I use daily when the option is there and whitelisting those domains in pihole.
I pay for BitWarden, not so much because of any feature in their premium offering as that they are critical infrastructure for me and have acted consistently ethically. Also the annual Wikipedia and for a while Mozilla monthly. Way less than what I feel is deserving.
However, I have been working on building a social foss funding site where you set a total recurring donation amount which is then distributed by the Method of Equal Shares accordrding to weights you specify, ether manually or sourced from your os package manager.
Main benefits of that approach is that your budget is fixed, you can spread it over an arbitrary number of recipients, and priority is given to those that are more unique to you.
Would love to hear thoughts if anyone is interested. I hope to maybe test out an alpha version some time in 2026 if time permits.
Wikipedia has enough money to pay their costs for decades, so I recommend dropping them.
Sounds cool. I do like the idea of sourcing it from the package manager, because honestly there is an insane amount of packages that go into a modern distro and knowing them all is either impractical or impossible. Something like this would also be nice for charity donations as well. It might exist for that, but if it does I’m unaware of it.
Don’t have anything recurring. More like random $10-20 thrown here and there. It’d probably be more often if it was all more integrated/streamlined. Pretty much the hyped up Flathub payments feature someday. I’d do that more often than patreon/opencollective/etc. I’ve had a patreon sub for a few projects over the years
I donate 100€ to KDE every year. I consider it my “windows license”, since it was the DE that allowed me to escape from windows 7 years ago.
Yearly budget of $200 for any apps I constantly use. I split the amount between the apps. Donate more if I have extra funds.
Cool I like idea of budget and splitting it between apps
Yeah, I do £10 a month and just give the money to a different project I use each month and log it in my notes app.
