Donations
Donations are the simplest funding model for many open source projects. They work best when a maintainer or team wants recurring support from users, companies, or community members without packaging work into fixed deliverables.
They are easier to start than Grants and more durable than one-off campaigns, but they depend on audience trust and repeated visibility. Donations are strongest when the project already has active users, clear public value, and a credible maintainer presence.
Good references in this category include GitHub Sponsors, Open Collective, Liberapay, and Ko-fi. Use them when you want direct supporter funding; combine them with broader Funding or Revenue models when the project needs more predictable scale.
StackAid
Distributes your subscription fee among your projects’ direct and indirect dependencies based on your project configuration.
Shukran
Enables creators get earnings through tips from people who enjoy their creative work regardless of audience size or algorithm.
Fountain
A predictable fundraising, income streams, surplus redistribution, and sustainable growth to open source and public goods.
Radicle
A peer-to-peer decentralized stack for building and sustaining open source software together
LibreSelery
Continuous and automated donation distribution to your project contributors and dependencies. Integrated into Github Actions
Flossbank
Funds entire dependency tree’s as they’re used with a combination of donation and ad revenue.
Amazon Smile
Amazon donates 0.5% of the eligible net purchase price to the charitable organisation of choice, such as OSS foundations.
Beerpay
Allows simple funding development of existing or new features for Github based projects using Chrome extension.
Buy me Coffee
Allows creators to receive support and share premium content with a link or a button on their website.
Flattr
Supports multiple online creators with one single subscription or with one-time donations
FOSS Pay
A self hosted Python and PostgreSQL based donation collection platform for groups and individuals.
GitHub Sponsors
Allows the developer community to financially support the people who design, build, and maintain the open source projects they depend on, directly on GitHub.
Hopsie
Allows fundraising through donation campaigns and follow up with marketing campaigns.
Houdini
Houdini is an all-in-one, self-hosted, open source fundraising software developed in Ruby on Rails.
Kauri
A decentralized technical knowledge base for the Ethereum ecosystem by incentivising creators and the community.
Ko-fi
A friendly way to ask fans to support your work for the price of a coffee.
Liberapay
Liberapay is a recurrent donations platform where people who benefit from free work support creators.
Open Collective
Provides tools for collectives to receive money and mechanisms to spend their money in a transparent way.
Open Gift
Allows open source consumers to send requests for implementations to the open source project teams.
Patreon
Empowers membership businesses for creators through regular donations.
Software Freedom Conservancy
A not-for-profit charity that helps promote, improve, develop, and defend FLOSS projects.
Software in the Public Interest
A non-profit organization to help organizations develop and distribute open hardware and software.
SourceCred
A tool for attributing credit to contributions based on metrics that describes how important they were.
Thanks
A tool that helps you see if any of the software you depend on has authors seeking for donations
Tipeee
Tipeee is a financing platform for Internet content creators allowing them to receive tips from their communities.