So, first: I agree with patio11. But past that, this thread also bugs me because it is so ill-informed: the very first question that has to be asked is "what is the distribution of donation amounts", as the way to minimize processing fees of "we got one donor who gives almost $2k, and then a handful of people we choose not to turn away who give a few dollars each" is very different than how you handle "we have $2k donors, they all give a dollar". PayPal's micropayment fees are $0.05+5%, which is a massive difference from the default $0.30+2.9% quoted.
And if you have only one really large donors, you get them to give you a check. And then you put their name somewhere. And you send them some thank you letters. And you ask for their advice on how to talk to their friends, as maybe they might also want to donate. Because patio11 is just dead-on right: it is more useful to increase the incoming money here, not avoid losing some fees :/. But again: even if we choose to nitpick fees... this conversation is still going nowhere if the distribution of donations and the process of receiving them (if you have mostly random donations, having them do bank transfers is going to massively increase the loss rate ;P) is not where the discussion started.
Lets agree that guys behind this project are not business-wise. Thus - they are not really in place to raise money, nor manage funds properly. With such an important "service" they provide, they could easily go in to ~$1 Million a year without sweating. They should look for manager/director to manage finances and growth strategy. I bet many marketing people would LOVE to manage such a project business wise including me!
All of that is really a waste of time. Regardless of the distribution of donations, it's basically chump change (<$100).
Most engineers should be able to make that in an hour. Heck, I'd be happy to pay that myself personally.
Given the amount of money in tech, and how critical OpenSSL is to the internet, nobody should even be worrying about costs. The only question should be why every major tech company isn't already writing them a $xx,xxx check.
this may be a stupid question but why is it hard for you to give OpenSSL money?
if this were a Dutch organisation (and I could spare that kind of money ...), I could either fire up my online banking and transfer it without any costs, or use the (slightly easier) iDEAL option and it'd cost them about 50 eurocents + 0% per transaction.
not even just for the Dutch btw, since recently, if they have an IBAN bank account number, you can just transfer money there (well, not to the US, apparently, but in the EU, parts of South America, Africa, Asia, ..[0])
> this may be a stupid question but why is it hard for you to give OpenSSL money?
Primarily because it's not tax-deductible. I try to restrict my charitable donations to things I can deduct.
The other reason I don't is that I'm not convinced it would be used effectively. They shouldn't be using small donations as their primary source of funding, they should be going after huge corporate supporters.
I'd be happy to donate $100 if it were tax-deductible and if OpenSSL committed to making the minimal effort of reaching out to major tech companies for substantive funding.
At the cutover level (around $5), the micropayment fee is $0.50, whereas the standard fee would be $0.45. It's not that massive a difference. If people are donating only one dollar, then it's a wider difference (10c vs 33c), but this level of donations is neither a serious chunk of the total pool, nor the kind of donors you want to attract. One of the donors gave $0.02 - clearly meant to be a joke or a system test, and not the kind of donor you want to court.
The cutover between micropayments and regular payments is $12. At $5 the difference is $0.30 vs $0.41 (including the non-profit discount, which does change where the cutoff is slightly, but I don't know what it is). (I don't know how you calculated $0.50, but 5% of $5 is $0.25, plus $0.05 makes $0.30.) So, it also makes at least some difference even if everyone is donating $10 (which again brings us back to the "you need to know the distribution of payments and the model for the conversion funnel before you can talk about fee optimization ;P).
Thanks for the correction. Looking again, my source said £5, and I overlooked the actual currency. As for screwing up the flagfall... that's just a complete miscalculation on my part, sorry.
And if you have only one really large donors, you get them to give you a check. And then you put their name somewhere. And you send them some thank you letters. And you ask for their advice on how to talk to their friends, as maybe they might also want to donate. Because patio11 is just dead-on right: it is more useful to increase the incoming money here, not avoid losing some fees :/. But again: even if we choose to nitpick fees... this conversation is still going nowhere if the distribution of donations and the process of receiving them (if you have mostly random donations, having them do bank transfers is going to massively increase the loss rate ;P) is not where the discussion started.