The Downsides of GitHub Sponsors... and a Solution

Mark Jackson — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 03:17:26 +0000

GitHub Sponsors is a way to receive funding as an open-source developer but it is lacking several features which make it unappealing to potential donors.

Let's look at the downsides of GitHub Sponsors and how they can be mitigated with Coindrop.

Coindrop is a 100% free, open-source webpage builder I created where you can list all your accepted forms of payment and let the donor choose the most convenient method to pay you.

The downsides of GitHub Sponsors

Limited payment options 💳

Everybody loves entering their credit card information into another website. Right..?

The only payment methods that can be used on GitHub Sponsors are Credit Card and PayPal.

Coindrop supports virtually all payment apps (CashApp, Venmo, etc), digital assets (Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc), and recurring donation platforms (Patreon, Buy Me A Coffee, etc).

10% platform fee for organizations 🏛

GitHub Sponsors has zero fees if you're an individual: 100% of donations will go to the developer. However if you're an organization, there is a 10% platform fee incurred on every payment.

Coindrop has zero platform fees regardless of whether you're an individual or organization.

Recurring donations only 🔁

Sending a quick "thank you" in the form of a few bucks should be easy on the internet. With GitHub Sponsors this is impossible because it forces users to subscribe to a recurring donation.

Coindrop gives the users the option: one-time or recurring donation?

Inflexible sponsorship tiers 🤔

On GitHub Sponsors, you must set fixed sponsorship tiers e.g. $5/month, $25/month, etc. This is a deterrant because if the donor's preferred amount is not in the list, they may be inclined to pick a lower amount or decide not to donate at all.

On Coindrop, the user chooses exactly how much they want to donate.

The Solution: Embed a Coindrop donation button in your GitHub project README ✔️

The concept of Coindrop is to list all your accepted forms of payment in one place and let people choose how to pay you based on what is most convenient and efficient for them.

Once you create a Coindrop (it takes less than 2 minutes), you can embed a button like this in your GitHub project's README.md:

Here is an example of the Coindrop button being used in the wild on GitHub.

If you don't like the style of this button, you are free to swap it out with your own design 😉 It is simply HTML code with an <a> tag for the link and an <img> tag for the button image.

Get started 🚀

The first step in setting up your Coindrop is picking a custom URL e.g. coindrop.to/mark (that's mine). You can always change it later.

Click here to create your first Coindrop. It's 100% free, zero fees.

Comments, Questions, Feedback

Feedback is more than welcome! Just leave a comment below :)

GitHub

Coindrop is 100% open source:

https://github.com/remjx/coindrop

DEV Community: Mark Jackson