2024 - My First Opensource Donation
I’ve always been a great admirer of opensource. I discovered at a young age that when searching for software to do small things such as download YouTube videos or convert images that appending “opensource” to the end of my Google search would result in finding simple, ad-free software. This was a design philosophy that I would adopt when later publishing my own opensource software.
As someone who has always been very careful with my own money I understand the struggle of opensource from both sides.
- As a developer; you are working for free using your own valuable free time, which you didn’t mind so much before you were working fulltime, but now definitely notice it a lot more. Sometimes, the problems you need to solve become too difficult or time-consuming, or you get one user which is just a bit too ungrateful, some compensation or appreciation would be nice!
- As a user; this software you found is great, and even better it didn’t cost a cent! It would just be perfect if it had this one missing feature… You’ll post a GitHub issue and hope they implement it out of the goodness of their own heart!
In 2024 a user made an issue on one of my less popular projects SorterExpress, they started with huge praise, saying how much they love it and how much time it’s saved them. It would just be great if there was a keyboard shortcut for this operation, and if PDFs and MOVs were supported. PDFs were a bit too much for me, but the other problems were simple, and I agreed with them. I did the work and thought for a moment “I’ll make a Ko-fi account, and when I tell them I made a new release, I’ll just drop the link below”. A few days later, I got an email from Ko-fi, they had made a $5 donation. I can still remember the smile it put on my face, this was the first donation I had ever received!
Also in 2024, my most popular program GChan had been broken by the addition of Cloudflare rate limiting to 4chan APIs. I don’t really use that site or the program anymore, but I was getting non-stop reports about this issue. After the experience of getting my first donation I figured I’ll see what I can do to fix the problem, make some more donation methods available, and just put them on my GitHub & within the GChan help menu on the new versions I’ll publish.
The new donation options within GChan.
I made 3 methods of donation available; Ko-fi, PayPal & GitHub sponsor. I placed the same options on my GitHub profile, and within the contribute page of PS2IODB. Over the course of the year, I received seven more donations!
| Amount (AUD $) | Method | Project |
| 5 | Ko-fi | SorterExpress |
| 4 | GitHub | GChan |
| 5 | Ko-fi | GChan |
| 20 | Ko-fi | GChan |
| 45 | Ko-fi | GChan |
| 5 | Ko-fi | GChan |
| 20 | Ko-fi | SorterExpress |
| 5 | Ko-fi | PS2IODB |
| Total: 109 |
Above is a table of all the donations I received in 2024, the method the donator chose, and the project of mine that led to the donation. It is clear that the users of GChan greatly appreciated the fixes I did, along with some small features I did while I was at it. Each of these donations motivated me to go further with the fixes, some of the code I wrote this year for GChan is some of the best I’ve written. What is also clear is that there is a clear favourite for making donations; Ko-fi. Ko-fi has been around for a while and has built good brand recognition as a simple & trustworthy service for this type of operation.
For all the work I did this year I never actually got a simple thank-you message from any users, but once I made the option to donate available, people thanked me with it. I think with this money I will forward it onto other opensource developers, to give them a smile as big as mine was everytime I got a notification.
Takeaways:
- Out of the 3 methods I provided, Ko-fi led to the most donations.
- The best software comes from passion not profits, prioritise making software you care about and people will appreciate it.
- The size of the donation doesn’t matter, the gesture and the resulting motivation is fantastic.
- People might appreciate your work more thank you think, just provide a method to let you know!