Donations are used to cover our costs (mainly servers and administrative/legal costs) and help us grow the platform. All money goes straight back to the project and is used for the community. This is a great way to contribute if you don’t have the time or ability right now to volunteer in other ways!
When you make a donation, the money goes to the Australian non-profit entity: the Couchers.org Foundation (more details are here). The donations are currently not tax-deductible, but we’re working on setting that up for those in the US tax system. Our expenses are openly available on the web, and we will be adding the donation amounts there each month. Additionally, we will be releasing annual financial reports with more detail information on where money comes from and how it’s used.
We’d be curious to hear people’s opinions about the page and what they want to see from us, as well as any other comments or concerns about the financial side.
This is great, and I’d love to, but… A way to contribute without a credit card would be greatly appreciated.
And also beneficial for Couchers as well, I suppose - because at least here in Germany CCs aren’t that common, I don’t know if that might be the case in other countries as well.
Same here, I personally do not have a Credit Card, and I do not trust PayPal either.
In the Netherlands we use a system named Ideal, where we can pay with
Thanks everyone here for the suggestions. I’ve been spending the last couple of hours looking into adding more payment methods and just wanted to give a quick update.
To integrate those payment methods using our payment processor (Stripe) requires a bit more work than I was hoping. It’s not just a matter of flipping a few switches. It requires work not only on the dev side (frontend as well as backend), but also in setting up some accounts with our bank and stripe for other currencies. That means we’ll do this in our next iteration of donations which will take a bit longer to get implemented and released.
For now it looks like we can add the following with reasonable effort:
Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) Direct Debit (EU)
If you add this, then that covers everywhere in SEPA, which is almost all of Europe. SEPA transfers are one of the most common forms of payment in Europe as they are just a normal bank transfer with standard (or no) fees, which is a lot better than a typical international transfer which tends to have much higher bank fees.
In Sweden a common and convenient pay method is called Swish, maybe requires a local Swedish account and phone number. That´s what I´d prefer if it´s possible.
I think Paypal should be included as soon as possible as well. It’s important to have other options for people who don’t want to use it, but I assume paypal is still the most widely used digital payment method.
Canadians also have Interac for debit payments and e-transfers.
I had a look now at the payment methods that Stripe supports. I guess the more options you can enable the better for the global userbase. There are probably other countries outside the EU as well, where credit cards are not widely used.
In another thread, @marlean asked if we’ve had any donations yet. I think this is the more appropriate thread to answer that question.
We’ve had a great start on donations, having raised $852 since we rolled out the donations page! We currently have (in total USD contributions):
12 donors under $25
3 donors between $25 and $250
1 donor over $250
We’re planning on having some of these stats readily available on the site in the next iteration as well as a setting that allows making your own donations public at your option. We’ll also add more payment methods then.
Thanks to everyone who has already made a financial contribution! It’s awesome to see so many people pitching in and supporting the project through donations.
