[ev1]

I would be curious about this too. I'm not a fan of using Patreon and their incredibly asinine policies (eg: no debit cards, no virtual cards, no OTP cards, credit only, otherwise arbitrary failures).

But anything that is "direct" for donations results in problems - by directly, I mean not going through a fee-eating third party that middlemans it. For example, numerous developer that I try to support with PayPal I will get the error "this payment can't be completed due to regulations" - apparently it is not possible to send to certain countries with paypal. Also known as: the places where those developers need it the most, compared to US/EU.

And for US banks, even sending small amounts to numerous western EU people all over the place near instantly triggers "cancel your card for fraud" safety checks.

The easiest way that is the least troublesome would be to donate to FSF or similar - but this means I can't choose where my impact goes, and the people whose software I use are likely to never see a sixpence of that donation.

[tbabej]

Have you tried donating to OSS through Github Sponsors? They act like a middleman (similar to Patreon), but take no fees (the also eat the CC processing fee), so the full amount being donated goes to the project.

This gets rid of the problem with multiple micro-payments, because all of your recurring donations are charged in bulk, once per billing cycle (monthly/yearly).

That said, not every project is on Github or has Github Sponsors feature enabled, but anecdotally the number seems to be growing over time.