I flat out despise paypal. Can i send cash?
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Not giving Paul a chance to jump in I would like to point your attention to the FAQ section:
https://ardour.org/faq.html#why-paypal
I have read it, but i still dislike it. Cash is so simple, and i really want to contribute!
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Cash may be simple to pay, but requires quite a lot of work on our part to process.
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The probabilities of finding $50 in an envelope are very close to 0 even in the rare cases the envelope started its journey with.
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I would love to be able to use PayPal, but they suspended my account 3 years ago without any explanation. So yea, I too hate PayPal. They have the bank account information of roughly 45% of the world’s people. I find it concerning. I also understand why you need it in the business sense, but that is not our fault and there should be an another optional method that works for all.
Sure it might be more expensive to allow CCs, but you still would gain in percentages. Just charge the extra 1-2% or whatever, which many businesses are now doing to offset that charge when using a card.
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To be clear, it isn’t about the percentage, it is about the upfront portion of that cost ($.30 typically) which on a $1 charge is a significant portion. Among other things (Like international payments, differences in income between various parts of the world, etc.)
Seablade
Yes, I understand that and still easily compensated for. If somebody checks out and only donates $1 that person gets charged $1.30. If they donate $5, they get charged $5.30. Simply add it as a “convenience fee”. Many businesses do this today and it does not deter anybody from using them and the businesses are happy to not have to pay the fee themselves.
That’s not how we currently roll, and I’m not inclined to do so.
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You know, I get it, and I’m not asking you to change anything.
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cause a problem.
Such credit card fees are prohibited in the EU.
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dont use paypal now and never will again…
I’m pretty new here, but I cannot hold back adding my two cents to that discussion. While I belong to the folks that do not use PayPal, I can understand the point in the FAQ considering the relation of micro-payments and fees. However, I cannot help but wonder if PayPal is the only way to overcome this.
It is probably safe to assume a benevolent attitude of the donors, as otherwise they would not donate in the first place. And as this thread shows, there is also an open and civilized discussion on that topic, that addresses the fee-related problems.
Taking these two points together, could it be an option to enable a different method of payment (with potentially higher fees), and simply ask any potential donor to use this method only for amounts above a certain threshold? Like “For donations below 10 $ please use PayPal, for higher amounts you may gladly use this IBAN account”
This might sound a little (?) naive, but is there a real risk that donors would use e.g. a wire transfer for micro-payments, even if they knew that they are causing problems on the recipient’s side? Eventually, any donation starts with the wish to do some good to the recipient, and no bad.
And if somebody can only give like 1 $ per month, which I absolutely respect, this person could make an annular “batch donation” of 12 $ for which the relation between donation and fee would be better.
As I said, just adding my two cents before returning to the blue-eyed realms of Utopia 
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This is something we’d like to avoid. One of the absolute marvels of working on Ardour is the way in which a stable, mostly flat income stream means that we don’t feel under pressure to put out new releases (that are not ready) just to bump up revenue. Ardour revenue does typically go up a little bit every time we do a new major release, but not by a lot and not for long (that has been the historical pattern, anyway).
While technically $X per month is no different than ($X x 12) per year in terms of actual revenue, it has an enormously different psychological impact.
And to repeat the central problem: there’s no issue with someone SWIFT-ing or otherwise getting money into some IBAN account number. The problem is connecting that with our record keeping systems in a meaningful way.
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