this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2026
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I've got some standing orders of 1 or 2 euros every month for bigger projects like grapheneos and kde. And for small apps that I actively use, I try to donate 5 or 10 euros now and then. It's not much but I believe if everyone is doing their part we succeed in the long run

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[–] ISolox@lemmy.world 34 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Not as much as I should be tbh.

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[–] Auster@thebrainbin.org 26 points 2 weeks ago

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. πŸ₯²

[–] tu11ebukk@piefed.social 16 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] PracticalFail@feddit.org 16 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] theuniqueone@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

None because I'm barely managing to avoid homelessness each month if I made more then I would do so though.

[–] RavenofDespair@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 weeks ago

No problem we each do what we can in this hard world.

[–] undrwater@lemmy.world 14 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] sam@piefed.ca 13 points 2 weeks ago

1$/month to every project I frequently use via Liberapay.

[–] D_Air1@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 weeks ago

Somewhere between $10 and $50 per transaction. Its not every month, but just randomly throughout the year depending on what I have.

[–] TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Nothing because I literally have no money

[–] artyom@piefed.social 4 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

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...

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[–] dosse91@lemmy.trippy.pizza 10 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] plc@feddit.dk 9 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

[–] night_petal@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 weeks ago

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.

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[–] darcmage@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] RavenofDespair@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] ambitiousslab@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] NinjaTurtle@feddit.online 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Yearly budget of $200 for any apps I constantly use. I split the amount between the apps. Donate more if I have extra funds.

[–] RavenofDespair@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Cool I like idea of budget and splitting it between apps

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[–] orenj 7 points 2 weeks ago

One time donations of $5 only, I am poor

[–] commander@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago

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

[–] FriedRice@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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..

[–] FG_3479@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

Crypto is likely the best solution. You should get some Monero and donate that. You can ask an AI chatbot like Google AI studio how to get some and put it into a self custody wallet in your country.

[–] Aussiemandeus@aussie.zone 6 points 2 weeks ago

I donate 5 to 10 aud every 6 months or so for connect for lemmy since i use it every day

[–] E_coli42@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] user28282912@piefed.social 5 points 2 weeks ago

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.Β 

[–] Core_of_Arden@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] Fizz@lemmy.nz 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

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.

[–] bskm@feddit.nu 4 points 2 weeks ago

$10 a month and sporadic donations to projects I believe are making a difference

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.

[–] Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (8 children)

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.

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[–] zutto@lemmy.fedi.zutto.fi 3 points 2 weeks ago

I'm donating a shy of 20€ per month to services automatically on Liberapay/Opencollective as long as I can. I do /try/ to give back on the projects that I use a lot in either my time and effort (IE: sitting in their IRC channels helping people for example), or a monetary donation.

It's not much, and I hope these open source projects never become something that depend on money and donations, but there are always cost to running services online.

[–] Duckytoast@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 weeks ago

About 20-30 euros each month. I Always budget 30 and give a bit more to tools I use regurarily and disperse the remainder on projects I tried, liked and felt like I wanted to donate to that month.

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

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 3 points 2 weeks ago

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.

[–] Paper_Phrog@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] illusionist@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] leriotdelac@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 weeks ago

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.)

[–] antyk@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

10€ monthly for Godot

[–] mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 weeks ago

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

[–] dieTasse@feddit.org 2 points 2 weeks ago

I live by rule "if everyone gave me 1 euro..." so I donate 1 euro/month to projects I use often (but I send actually 12/year to spare the devs some trx costs) and 1 euro/year to projects that I use sometimes (again I send 5 Eur/5 years actually). I use almost only open source and I haven't yet paid everyone. I also recently made an open source application where I didn't setup any donations channel, I simply like doing it.. Maybe in the future if I have more work on it, but not now..

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