GitHub sponsors - current report
I enabled GitHub sponsors for some of my projects, mainly because a happy user wanted to donate money to support my work. So I thought: Why not collect the donations for charitable purposes. Here is a current report.
Introduction
I never thought my personal Open Source projects would earn ANY reputation, and I’m still surprised, how many people use my software. The tools I created are pretty niche and mostly made for power users.
Well, even if they are not made for everyone, I earned an impressive amount of more than 1k GitHub stars and a remarkable amount of donations over the last months.
I love Open Source, made the switch from macOS to Linux last year and I’m not planning to go back, so you an expect more projects to come…
However, since I’m in the lucky situation to be a developer with good income working on Open Source projects just for fun in my free time, I plan to use all sponsored money for real world charitable purposes (see below).
My Open Source projects
My projects with most attention (and stars) are:
- m4b-tool - tool to merge, split or and manipulate audiobook files with chapters
- tone - a cross platform audio tagger
There are some more small projects , but nothing too exciting for now.
Finding charities deserving support
There are lots of possibilities to donate money for charity, but not all of them are transparent on how they work or how they use the donated money.
After a bit of research (german) the following organisations caught my attention, because they are the most valuable and transparent projects with charitable purpose available I could find in Germany (where I live):
Since charitable donations are most useful when a certain amount is donated (at least 150.00$), I’d like to wait until the sponsorships pass this value. This way the sponsored money is most useful to the selected projects.
Taxes and sponsorship overview
Unfortunately the sponsorship income also is something I have to report in my yearly tax declaration. So in my opinion it makes most sense to yearly update this report at the end of the december to keep it in sync with this process and reduce the bureaucracy.
Currently, there are a few monthly sponsors and some one-time sponsorships. I’ll try to keep these reports up to date at least at the end of every year based on real payouts.
Note: The donation receipts need some time to arrive, so I will post them a bit later. To be as transparent as possible, I’ll post a redacted transfer receipt
Report 2023
| Month | Payout Amount |
|---|---|
| August | € 182.68 |
| September | € 5.56 |
| October | € 5.68 |
| November | € 5.66 |
| December | € 5.53 |
| Total payout | € 205.11 |
Donation proof - € 206.00 to Welthungerhilfe
Conclusion
I would really like thank all my sponsors for donating their money, trusting in my promises and hope these reports help everyone understand what their money is used for… I really appreciate your support.
Please let me know if I missed something or if I can help you with more detailed information or more transparency.
