The fourth year of Liberapay
Tags: Payments, Open Source, Donations

The fourth year of Liberapay

Automatic renewals are finally here!

In last year’s post we said we were working on “the possibility to have your donations be renewed automatically”. Well, it took way longer than we had hoped, but it’s finally done. 😌

Screenshot of the new renewal method selector in donation forms

This feature is very new and still rough around the edges. For example the automatic renewal only works with Stripe, not with PayPal. Nevertheless we’re hopeful that it will satisfy many donors and help stabilize the incomes of creators. Of course we’ll keep working to improve it.

If you’re a donor, go check out your new “Payment Schedule” page. If you want to turn on automatic renewals for all your donations, go to your “Giving” page and click on the “Yes, activate automatic renewals” button at the top.

Screenshot of a payment schedule

Recap of other changes

Grouped payments

The other improvement we mentioned in last year’s blog post was the possibility to fund donations to multiple creators with a single payment. This has been implemented on our side, in several steps throughout the year, but it’s still limited to a small subset of recipients due to the limitations of the underlying payment processors (Stripe and PayPal). In the last month approximately 10% of payments had more than one recipient.

Multiple payment instruments

Donors can now see and manage their connected cards and bank accounts in the new “Payment Instruments” page, and select any of them during payment.

Screenshot of the new “Payment Instruments” page

Receipts

When we first migrated to the new payment processors we didn’t immediately update the donation receipt generator, so for a while there were no receipts for new payments. This shortcoming was fixed in June. You can find the links to your receipts in the your account’s ledger.

Visual tweaks

We changed the orientation of several navigation elements from horizontal to vertical in order to make room for more pages and at the same time improve how the Liberapay website adapts to different screen sizes.

More countries

This improvement isn’t our doing, but it’s good news: creators in Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia can now connect a Stripe account (which allows their donors to pay “directly”, without having to go through PayPal). If your country still isn’t supported by Stripe, you can preregister to let them know that you’re interested and be notified as soon as they launch in your country.

Growth

At the beginning of 2019 Liberapay was still suffering from 2018’s crisis, however we’ve successfully bounced back: both the number of active users and the sum of donations have more than doubled in the past year.

Approximately €160k have been donated to 652 creators through Liberapay in 2019

Future

Liberapay is far from perfect, we still have many things to fix and improve, and several big features to implement. For example we know that some creators would like to be able to send updates to their donors, and customize the donation form, and see who their patrons are so they can thank them.

Getting all that done requires a lot of work, so please donate if you can, and contribute in kind if you have the necessary skills and time. We need developers to improve Liberapay’s core, writers to expand our documentation, and polyglots to translate Liberapay.

Thank you for reading. Have a great year. 💛