Donate Less

25 edent 7 6/26/2025, 6:34:29 AM blogs.gnome.org ↗

Comments (7)

ncruces · 5h ago
Same logic applies to all subscriptions.

This may look fine when it's one sub.

But then you're spending hundreds of €$£ a month on stuff and need to go through a list of dozens of things to figure out which you should continue paying for.

So no. I will continue to donate randomly to stuff, and limit subscriptions to a handful I can mentally keep track of. I'm sorry.

PS: I like, and very much respect, how Kagi handles subscriptions. Not gonna work for donations, but I wish more services handled things that way.

joshstrange · 1h ago
> We would vastly prefer you donate $10/mo for one year ($120 total) than $200 in one lump sum. That’s counter-intuitive, so let me explain.

For a long time now I've wanted to build a donation subscription management service. A sort of "Set how much you want to donate a month and allocate it to charities of your choice". Tools to let you do %, flat $, "whatever isn't allocated, allocate to this charity", etc. And things like an easy way to re-route your giving to a crisis for a period of time (one-time, x-months, ongoing).

Most non-profits have really rough donation portals (UI/UX) and having to log into 5-10+ portals to manage your giving is annoying. Also, I think a number of people are overwhelmed by giving, as in they don't know where to start. Giving them an easy way to manage it in 1 place and protecting them from getting spammed (unless they opt-in to get "updates") seems like a win.

kristianp · 4h ago
How can I donate to the KDE desktop project? Gnome's UI has no sense to it at all. Look at gedit, it has three menus including one hamburger menu. Just do a menu bar, people!
MaxBarraclough · 3h ago
KDE accepts donations. https://kde.org/donate/
ValdikSS · 2h ago
For my projects, I prefer to collect the money for the whole year operation in advance. This allows me not to refer to subscription model, yet not to ask for donations every month.
petercooper · 5h ago
The argument is totally sound for comparing lump sum versus regular donations, but if the option comes down to $200 lump sum vs nothing, the lump sum wins.

95% of my donations to various things are lump sums as I've proven prone to losing track of subscriptions, so it's good to retain the option (as GNOME has). It can also be a lot simpler to make one-off donations as a company for accounting reasons.

abnercoimbre · 7h ago
Now that's what I call an effective fundraising campaign. Indeed, small monthly donors feel more stable than large, one-off checks (even if, in theory, the latter is larger than the former.)