Idea for additional fee-free way to send donations

This project is a wonderful initiative. I’m excited for it and badly want it to succeed :slight_smile:

To that extent I wanted to start a tiny recurring donation, but when I tried via Liberapay + SEPA Direct Debit, my donation got rejected with “The payment is blocked due to a high likelihood of chargeback.” error. I reached out to Liberapay, but I haven’t heard back yet.

Meanwhile, I don’t like using debit/credit cards for a few €/yr kind of donations, because fees eat a big % of the donation.

So here’s an idea: would it be possible for you to post your bank account number (IBAN) so that those who want to donate can just transfer money to your account directly?

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Hey @mateuszwieloch :waving_hand:

Very cool that you want to support the project moving forward!

While a direct SEPA would indeed be an option without any fee, we chose LiberaPay for a few reasons:

  • It has low-moderate fees
  • It supports custom intervals
  • It provides donation receipts for every contribution
  • It bundles everything in one place
  • It allows transparent distributions to the people who “do the work”
  • It is a non-profit project itself

As we aren’t an association but a company on the legal side, we can’t (and don’t want) to issue a membership fee (like Codeberg does). Neither do we want to offer any official priced tier.

Accepting SEPA would also mean to require a clear project identifier for internal bookkeeping and lowering the transparency of the project: users couldn’t see the direct flow of funds and we’d need to come up with a regular trustable audit of how much money we received. As the fees are percentage-based, we’d likely only offer it for larger amounts. If we’d open it for small/micro contributions, we’d have a lot more bookkeeping costs.

Meanwhile, I don’t like using debit/credit cards for a few €/yr kind of donations, because fees eat a big % of the donation.

Liberapay has the option to link a SEPA account for payments - did you see that option? SEPA is processed through Stripe and fees would be at 3.1%. Would this, combined with a yearly schedule, result in a state which would be acceptable for you?

We just checked our Liberapay account and could find the blocked transactions with a reference to the Stripe FAQ. Given the amount and duration it might be that the combination of both is too low (amount) resp. long (time)? Maybe that combined with your country of origin? (which we can’t see there).

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I have linked SEPA account for payments in Liberapay prior to trying to send SEPA Direct Debit contribution, but I was still blocked by Stripe. It might be because I live in Poland, where € accounts are not very common (Poland uses zł currency, but I also have € account). It is still pain in the butt, because I started implementing plan to support many projects annually with micro donations (€3+/yr) and I’ve heard with debit/credit card fees often exceed 10%, which is a little disheartening %-wise (although not a lot of money in general terms of course).