Liberapay
Liberapay
Role
Recurring-donations-only rail on the family-wide /support page.
Sits in the donations grid alongside
GitHub Sponsors, Ko-fi, and
Buy Me a Coffee. Liberapay is donation-only by
design — no products, no perks, no tiers — which makes it the
cleanest fit for "I just want to give the maintainer a few euros a
week" without any expectation of return.
Free tier
- 0% platform fee, forever — Liberapay is itself a non-profit
(
LiberapayASBL) funded by Liberapay donations - Payment-processor fees apply (Stripe ~2.9% + 30¢ or PayPal equivalent, paid by the donor — not by us)
- Recurring weekly / monthly / yearly donations with caps optionally configurable
- OSS codebase (
liberapay/liberapay.com, AGPL-3.0) - Multi-currency (EUR / USD / GBP / etc.)
Card / subscription required?
NO. Free-tier sign-up is email + payout method (Stripe Express Connect, PayPal, or SEPA bank transfer for EU). No payment method requested from us.
Methods exposed to the donor
Card (Stripe), PayPal. SEPA direct debit for EU donors. Donor sets the recurrence schedule themselves; the payment is consent-based per-transaction (the donor's processor authorises each charge, Liberapay never stores card-on-file on our side).
Alternatives
- GitHub Sponsors — also 0% platform, GitHub-native; covers similar audience
- Ko-fi — 0% platform, broader UX (one-off + shop + memberships)
- Buy Me a Coffee — 5% platform fee, similar UX
- Polar.sh — adjacent (subscriptions + products with MoR)
- Open Collective — transparent fund accounting, fiscal-host model
Swap cost
Low — single button on /support; deep-link is https://liberapay.com/<handle>/donate. No webhook integration required for the donation itself (Liberapay handles delivery + receipts).
Why this is our pick
- 0% platform fee — Liberapay is itself a non-profit, no margin-extraction
- Donation-only by design — donors who pick Liberapay self-select out of any product expectation, which is the cleanest motivation alignment we can offer
- OSS codebase — escape hatch is real (AGPL-3.0 source available)
- Mature (founded 2015) and stable; small but reliable platform
- EU-friendly — SEPA direct debit support broadens the donor base into Europe at lower cost than card processing
Quirks worth knowing
- Donations are paid forward — Liberapay holds donor funds and pays out to the recipient on a weekly schedule. There's a small delay between donation and payout.
- Liberapay does not issue tax receipts — donors who need receipts for charitable deduction should use Open Collective via an aligned fiscal host.