Building donation tools to fix open source funding

this product

The last few months I've been working with my co-founder (@erulabs) on two tools that we think will help the open source community get funding from the people who use their projects: a platform for handling software donations, the Thanks App, and a specification for adding donation metadata to your package.json, the Donate Spec.

Currently, you'll often see a Paypal or Patreon "Donate" button on the website of an open source project, but this only gets visibility when someone is in a rush to download software and accomplish a task. If we're using other people's software, supporting the people who write and publish it freely should be top-of-mind.

So, the Donate Spec helps you do just that. As an open source developer, you can add a donate to your package.json, detailing how collaborators prefer to receive and split donations, and allowing you to update details directly without leaving GitHub.

While publishing a spec feels great, it's not going to get much traction unless there are some tools which can parse and use it. So we built the Thanks App (https://givethanks.app) as a donation platform that users can discover projects to support, and developers can receive funds on. We are tightly integrated into NPM and GitHub, so your project's donation info is visible immediately after publishing or committing.

We also plan on making some pull requests to already awesome tools like Feross's thanks and yarn, allowing these tools to parse specs of the dependencies you use and give you options for donating.

We just launched, and I'd love to hear your feedback on how we can continue making this the best platform for open source authors. Thanks!