Move from a single server to two servers with a load balancer for more robust services: €66 (estimated, Amazon AWS)
Soon, we’ll hopefully also have a student to work on machine learning for error detection. The exact amount for that hasn’t been decided yet, but it will be around €500 per month for a period of six months.
To cover all these costs by donations, we’d need:
€12 Forum
€66 servers
€500 student
€578/month for a period of six months
There are more ideas, like paying students to write error detection rules, but with €578/month we’d reach our first goal. If that sounds like much, it’s less than 30 users contributing €20 each.
We now have to decide how asking for donations will work: what payment provider are we going to use? Or are we going to use a platform like patreon? This is something I don’t have any experience with, so please share your ideas.
The option to pay directly into a bank account is good, but it should not be the only option.
To send money from my bank to a non-UK bank account costs me approximately 10 euros. If we ask for donations, we should not expect the contributor to pay bank charges.
I tested with a credit card. The process was simple.I received a receipt soon after I paid.
Comments about the process:
The selection of ‘One-time’ or ‘Monthly’ is not as clear as possible.I think the selection would be clearer if radio buttons were used (like the options for the amount.)
As a business, I can claim the donation against tax. But, to do that, the receipt should contain more information. Include the registered address and the USt-IdNr (same as on the Imprint, LanguageTool - Imprint).
In Opera (Chromium) and Firefox, the only change I would make is to improve the visual consistency, either by enlarging the donation widget to the same width of the text, or centering the widget on the page.
I agree, but it seems we’re limited to what DonorBox offers here. DonorBox is a service that makes the whole process very easy, but we lose a flexibility when it comes to the design of the form.
I’ve added that. At least in Germany and from a tax point of view, this donation is an expense like any other. That’s because LT isn’t a recognized nonprofit.
What country was that? There are thousands and thousands of publically known accounts, how should customers pay their invoices without knowing the account information?
The German Wikimedia chapter also publishes its IBAN+BIC for donations (https://spenden.wikimedia.de), and many others do it, too.
So who could test PayPal? I can’t, as I only have one PayPal account and that’s already the account that gets the money, so I assume I cannot use it to also send the money at the same time.
For more transparency, I’ll list all donations in this spreadsheet. That page will be updated at least once a month, or more often in case there are many or large donations.
Two tests are still needed so we can announce and link the donations page:
Someone needs to make a small one-time donation via PayPal.
I must make sure the money actually gets transferred to the donation account. This will take about a week.
I couldn’t fix this, so I’ve added a separate PayPal button to http://languagetool.org/donate/ instead. Could anybody test this? You can donate €1 or maybe less.
Thanks @Jan_Schreiber for testing it, it worked. Was the process okay from your point of view, too? Then I’ll add a link to the donation page to the page’s top navigation.