Understanding fees are a really confusing part of supporting creators of things you like. I provide a few ways for people to support my work, and my supporters can struggle to understand the differences between them. It comes down to fees, of which there are several kinds (note: I just made these terms up):

• Transaction fees are charged by the payment processor (the company that takes down your card number and runs the transaction with your bank). These are typically in the form of a percentage of the transaction plus a few cents.
• Platform fees are charged by the platform (e.g. Patreon) to run their operation, typically in the form of a fixed percentage of the transaction.
• Withdrawal fees are charged to move money from the platform to the creator’s bank account. These vary depending on the withdrawal processor.
• Taxes are also implicated, depending on how much the creator makes.

All of this adds up to a very confusing picture. I’ve made a calculator to help you sort it out.

Note: For an up-to-date calculation of Patreon’s fees, see the follow-up post.

Sources

fosspay

Only the typical Stripe fee is applied.

Note: I am the author of fosspay, if you didn’t already know.

Patreon

How do you calculate fees?

What are my options to receive payout?

Liberapay

FAQ

Have a comment on one of my posts? Start a discussion in my public inbox by sending an email to ~sircmpwn/public-inbox@lists.sr.ht [mailing list etiquette]

Are you a free software maintainer who is struggling with stress, demanding users, overwork, or any other social problems in the course of your work? Please email me — I know how you feel, and I can lend a sympathetic ear and share some veteran advice.

---

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Allocator Designs

This post explains how to implement heap allocators from scratch. It presents and discusses different allocator designs, including bump allocation, linked list allocation, and fixed-size block allocation. For each of the three designs, we will create a ba…

via Writing an OS in Rust January 20, 2020

Status update, January 2020

This month's status update will be a little lighter than usual due to Christmas holidays. I've still got the chance to send a patches to quite a few projects, and… do a lot of releases! Weston, Wayland, Sway, mako and grim all have or will get a r…

via emersion January 16, 2020

Needlepoint

Inspired by Peter Watts’ The Freeze-Frame Revolution and The Island. Each birth is violent in the same way. I erupt into the void, my mirrored surface riotous with gamma radiation, parafluid sheeting from my forced extremities, ripped away by gravitational sh…

via Aphyr: Posts January 15, 2020

Generated by openring