[fatcat500]

If there was a button on Github that donated small amounts of money to the maintainer(s) of a project, I would press it frequently for many libraries I depend on.

For example, donating 25 or 50 cents every time I visit gofiber/fiber would be fine with me.

However, there is no way to feasibly charge small quantities of money without the majority of it getting raked in processing fees. For example, Stripe charges 30 cents plus 2.9 percent (last I checked), meaning only ~20 cents would make it to the maintainer(s).

The same issue exists with rewarding content creators. You either donate a non-trivial amount of money (often recurring) like $10 a month (which means you have to keep track of that expense, which is arguably an even greater disincentive for donating), or you don't donate at all.

[tbabej]

You can donate small amounts of money to any project with Github Sponsors custom one-time payments enabled [1]. Github pays all the processing fees and the maintainers get 100% of your donation.

[1] https://github.blog/changelog/2021-04-06-custom-amounts-and-...

[seoaeu]

You could increase your donation estimate by 10x and it probably still wouldn't be worth the effort. On GitHub, starring a repository is free and yet log4j2 was only has about 1700 of them. Even if each of those was a donation, your suggested 25 or 50 cents translates to only about a single day of a market rate developer salary.