Support me (or don't)

This post has been brought to you by the “How's this for a funding?” department.

Open source developpers, bloggers, video creators, etc. all crave that sweet money to live and fund projects. I won't say that I'm the opposite, but let me make my stance clear.

I am trying to make my independent activity profitable. For that, I have many missions:

  1. Operations research freelance missions.
  2. Operations research videos and posts.
  3. Photography.
  4. This blog.

Obviously, number 1 is financed by those hiring me. I do numbers 3 and 4 purely for the love of the game, but what if I want to monetize number 2 or if people want to support what I do in numbers 3 and 4?

Well, I've looked into it, and the main takeaway is that all donation and subscription services are outright horrible, especially when you look at the payout conditions, as most services require setting up accounts in other websites. Let me describe them briefly in order of preference:

Buymeacoffee: Payout is only possible via Stripe, an American service. Did I already talk to you about how much I despise dependance on American (or any other country to be honest) software? Moreover, Buymeacoffee also has a “review” step before allowing your money to get withdrawn, whatever that review is.

Ko-fi: Payout is only possible via Stripe (again) or PayPal, another American service.

Liberapay: Payout is also only possible via Stripe or PayPal. What a shame for a “libre” service.

Tipeee: Tipeee is different from those considered above. First, it's European, so there's already that. Second, it allows donators to use two methods, PayPal or credit card. Therefore, it's necessary for the receiver to also setup PayPal and a bank account. It's not possible to allow only one or the other (1). Therefore, I will not be using it, but this would be my definite solution if PayPal was not mandatory.

Patreon: Patreon allows withdrawing via bank account alone, even if it's through the American Payonneer. The only problem with Patreon are the huge fees.

So, now I suppose that your next question is “Luis, given your appreciation of federated and open-source software, what about cryptocurrency?”

And to that I answer that cryptocurrency, aside from the speculation, taxes, and centralized exchanges, is the perfect way to donate. It's private and with few fees. Problem is I don't know how to spend those cryptocoins once I've got them...

Anyway, here are my adresses. Please don't save them, they may be changed in the future.

To conclude, here's my “Support me” post. My final words are: please support me if you have the means, enjoy my content, and want to finance me. However, if you don't have the means or simply don't want to finance me, don't worry, you won't miss anything of my content. For now, you can only donate via cryptocurrency, but hopefully in the future I will be able to use Tipeee.

Bonus note: I am absolutely not interested in using some of the cited services to propose backers-only content, because instead of bonus content, you can see that as a paywall for non-backers. So rest assured, all my content will remain public, although some other perks could be considered for backers in the future.