I donate 0. I hope I'll be able to do more once I get the new job. (I have a monthly donation budget, but it's spent on other causes at the moment.)
I donate to Signal. I intend to increase my contributions to other open source (Linux) projects this year though. I expect them to need it more than ever soon.
None, I'm unemployed and don't have the money to spare :3
When I still had my last job I would donate really any time I thought about it, around 5-10$ a time. Still not really enough, but it was part time minimum wage.
hoping to figure that out this year, once I do an overhaul of what I'm using and figuring out
just know that half of my budget for this will come from what I was previously spending on mega corp subscriptions (not much, but more than I am now). the other half will be based on its value to me
I started to donate once a year to my Linux os and apps I like. I also need to set up a small monthly for apps I like. If we don't show support when we can we will lose the some great projects.
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.
None.
Reason being simply financial responsibility - if something is free, then giving out money for it seems wasteful, like throwing money out of the window. You can argue it's not much, I got value from, it supports the developer, it's the moral thing to do, and you would probably be right. But this is simply not the priority perspective from which I am looking at it.
Found the economist
You're not throwing money out the window though, you're giving it directly to someone. Someone who has used their craft to create something that has value to you. I'm not necessarily criticising you for not donating, I just want to shift your perspective that your money wouldn't be valued by other people.
I know, but if it was that easy to shift perspectives, the world would be a completely different place. I dislike the donation format since it plays a lot on the moral and psychology of the person - how much is enough, how much value does it actually provide me etc. Like I am the one doing the sales for the person. I much rather have a clear price.
Maybe it's just because of donations and the "uncertainty" it makes me feel. I did pay for open source software before (open source != free), guess I prefer just to see a clear price tag.
That's a fair take. I can relate to the feeling of uncertainty. When I make small donations of a couple of euros I have to push away my feelings that the donation could be seen as insultingly low. It's hard to judge what a "fair" price is. But after all, many donation buttons say "Buy me a coffee" so I would hope the amount is appreciated either way.
Some years I donate nothing. Other years it's about 50 euro... Depend on a lot of things. I believe in giving to the free software, because that makes it better, and since I'm a user, that's great - and I like to keep it running.
1$/month to every project I frequently use via Liberapay.
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. 🥲
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.
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.
I like the little badge I get for being a donar on Signal. Other than that, my default is $5/mo or whatever the site's recommended amount is.
10€ monthly for Godot
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.
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.
Somewhere between $10 and $50 per transaction. Its not every month, but just randomly throughout the year depending on what I have.
I donate $50 a year to KDE and GrapheneOS each.
Gonna donate $50 a year to Libreoffice and maybe CachyOS starting June.
Gonna donate the same to the Servo browser if it becomes even remotely usable.
Used to donate to Mint but stopped because I don't use Mint anymore.
It’s not much but I believe if everyone is doing their part we succeed in the long run
I agree completely with this. I only donate a token amount of ~2 EUR per year to some projects: it won't do anything by itself, yet still, if everyone did the same, it would be really impactful.
For a few projects that are most important to me, I donate up to ~15 EUR per month. It's both a lot of money, and also not a lot at the same time. By itself, it still has a tiny impact, but it is a decent monthly expense, especially when donating to a few projects.
To me it really highlights that we can't help fund anything by ourselves. After donating some amount yourself, the next best thing you can do is encourage other people to donate too!
There's a really cool project called Snowdrift that tries to harness that dynamic. They came up with a concept called "crowdmatching", where everyone's donation is linked to the number of people donating to the project (up to a cap).
Although progress on that project is quite slow, I really hope to see it succeed some day, as I think it really thoughtfully and neatly manages to coordinate people to band together to fund projects, and make a real difference as a group.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Infrequently. Sometimes like 5 euros. Could do more but I am not fully reliant on open source. I wish ublock origin accepted donations though.
What I will say is that if you donate small amounts, saving up is better if possible. I know some charities I donate to mentioned transaction charges could be 1 or 2 euros per transaction. So donating a low amount could really eat into your donation.
In Germay / Europe we have a good banking system where oftentimes you don't pay for the transaction. You just need an IBAN.
Giving money to stripe or paypal seems to be nuts, imo.
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.
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
One time donations of $5 only, I am poor
I haven't yet donated, because u want an easy and privacy minded way to donate. I'm not fan of crypto, because I still don't understand how. How do you donate and still have privacy? Like I don't want the bank or state to know what I support..
I donate 5 to 10 aud every 6 months or so for connect for lemmy since i use it every day
When ive used a project for a while and i have extra cash I usually do a 20$ donation. Ive been low on money last year so I only donated to a few of the projects, listenbrainz and Lemmy.
Ideally I want to donate a small amount yearly to all the projects I use.
For the free programs I use, I have a total of around 100$ to give every year. The more programs or projects I want to support, the less there is for each. Otherwise, I’d just become poorer and poorer.
For paid pograms and services, I’m also trying to not go for the cheapest but the ethically better ones.
I also have a 2 patreons to support creators who speak about FOSS.
I think you don’t have to give much, but you should always try to give something every year.
$10 a month and sporadic donations to projects I believe are making a difference
Depends on the project and the kind of utility I get from it. Up to $20 USD typically, but I've donated more for specific cases.
5 to 10 bucks here and there for things I use. I do have a couple 5 a month subscription. I could probably give more but I forget
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