Liberapay support in Store
asked 2018-03-12 18:38:22 +0200
Liberapay would be a great way to allow people to send a recurring donation to the developers of apps they appreciate using. It's similar to Flattr, but it's entirely free (as in freedom and as in beer). It also appears to be easier to set up and use, so it could even replace Flattr entirely. Quoting the website:
What is Liberapay?
Liberapay is a way to donate money recurrently to people whose work you appreciate.
Payments come with no strings attached. You don't know exactly who is giving to you, and donations are capped at €100.00 per week per donor to dampen undue influence.
Donations are public. By default, the total amount you give and the total amount you receive are public (you can opt out of sharing this info).
Liberapay does not take a cut of payments, the service is funded by the donations to its own account. So, recipients get the full value of the donations, but there are payment processing fees when moving money in or out of Liberapay.
Liberapay is an open project, you can help us translate it, improve its code, and manage its legal entity. If you do so you'll be able to join the Liberapay team and receive a share of the money that our users donate to keep the service running.
How do you envision LP support in the Store? As such, all you need to do is to add a link in the description and homepage (repository) of the software to your LP account. In general, I can only recommend it on the basis of my experience - its transparent in terms of the cache flow and easy to everyone to see how many people and how much cache is contributing. However, you cannot thank the contributors personally, since you don't know who is contributing, just the number of them.
Setting up an account was easy, pressingly the same for contributors. There is, however, limitation on countries from which the donations are accepted. In SFOSverse context, the notable exception is Russia from where there are difficulties in terms of donating, as far as I understood. It has something to do with the money processor used by LP.
But when we talk about Store support, its not very clear what Store has to do about it.
rinigus ( 2018-03-14 09:37:37 +0200 )editYou could say the same thing about the current Flattr button, in that you could just put a link in the description. A button that's always in the same place is more likely to be found, and tapped. Other than that, there is indeed not much else the Store needs to support, although it would be nice if all of the donation stuff could happen inside the Store, without needing to use a browser. Considering Liberapay is free software, I think it should be possible.
nthn ( 2018-03-14 09:55:07 +0200 )edit