Decaf Ko-Fi: Launching GitHub Sponsors et al
Since our massive growth at the end of last year, many of you have asked about ways to donate beyond Nóva’s Ko-Fi. There were a few limitations there, notably the need to create an account in order to donate. There were a few milestones we needed to hit before we could do this properly, notably we needed to have an EIN in order to properly receive donations and pay for services (as an entity).
Well that time has come! Read on to learn about how you can support Hachyderm either directly or via Hachyderm’s parent organization, the Nivenly Foundation.
First things first: GitHub Sponsors
Actual Octocat from our approval email
As of today the Hachyderm GitHub Sponsors page is up and accepting donations! Using GitHub Sponsors you can add a custom amount and donate either once or monthly. There are a couple of donation tiers that you can choose from as well if you are interested in shoutouts / thank yous either on Hachyderm or on our Funding and Thank You page. In both cases we’d use your GitHub handle for the shoutout.
The shoutouts and Thank You page
#ThankYouThursday is a hashtag we’re creating today to thank users for their contributions. Most posts for #ThankYouThursday happen on Hachyderm’s Hachyderm account, but higher donations will be elible for shoutouts on Kris Nóva’s Hachyderm.
- $7/mo. and higher
- Get a sponsor badge on your GitHub profile
- $25/mo. and higher or $100 one-time and higher
- Get a sponsor badge on your GitHub profile
- Get a shoutout on the Hachyderm account’s quarterly #ThankYouThursday
- $50/mo. and higher or $300 one-time and higher
- Get a sponsor badge on your GitHub profile
- Get a shoutout on the Kris Nóva’s account’s quarterly #ThankYouThursday
- $1000 one-time and higher
- Get a sponsor badge on your GitHub profile
- Get a shoutout on the Hachyderm account’s quarterly #ThankYouThursday
- Be added to the Thank You List on our Funding page
- $2500 one-time and higher
- Get a sponsor badge on your GitHub profile
- Get a shoutout on Kris Nóva’s quarterly #ThankYouThursday
(All above pricing in USD.)
A couple of important things about the above:
- All public announcements are optional. You can choose to opt-out by having your donation set to private.
- By default we’ll use your GitHub handle for shoutouts. This is easier than reconciling GitHub and Hachyderm handles.
- We may adjust the tiers to make the Thank Yous more frequent.
Right now the above tiers are our best guess, but we may edit the #ThankYouThursday thresholds in particular so that we can keep a sustainable cadence. Thank you for your patience and understanding with this ❤️
And now an update for the Nivenly Foundation
For those who don’t know: the Nivenly Foundation is the non-profit co-op that we’re founding for Hachyderm and other open source projects like Aurae. The big milestone we reached here is that 1 ) we’re an official non-profit with the State of Washington and 2 ) we have a nice, shiny, EIN which allowed us to start accepting donations to both the Nivenly Foundation as well as its two projects: Aurae and Hachyderm. For visibility, here are all the GitHub sponsor links in one place:
It is also possible to give a custom one-time donation to Nivenly via Stripe:
Right now only donations are open for Nivenly, Aurae, and Hachyderm. After we finalize Nivenly’s launch, Nivenly memberships will also be available for individuals, maintainers, and what we call trade memberships for companies, businesses, and business-like entities.
What do Nivenly Memberships mean for donations?
Right now, donations and memberships are separate. That means that you can donate to Hachyderm and, once available, join Nivenly as two separate steps. As Nivenly’s largest project, providing governance and funding for Hachyderm uses almost all of Nivenly’s donations. As we grow and include more projects this is likely to shift over time. As such, we are spinning up an Open Collective page for Nivenly that will manage the memberships and also provide a way for us to be transparent about our budget as we grow. Our next two big milestones:
- What you’ve all been waiting for: the public release of the governance model (almost complete)
- What we definitely need: the finalization of our 501(c)3 paperwork with the IRS (in progress)
As we grow we’ll continue to post updates. Thank you all so much for your patience and participation 💕
P.S. and update: What’s happening with Ko-fi?
We are currently moving away from Kris Nóva’s Ko-fi as a funding source for Nivenly and Hachyderm et al. We’ve created a new Ko-fi account for the Nivenly Foundation itself:
Kris Nóva’s Ko-fi is still live to give people time to migrate Nivenly-specific donations (including those for Hachyderm and Aurae) from her Ko-fi to either GitHub sponsors, Nivenly’s Ko-fi, Stripe or starting a Nivenly co-op general membership via Nivenly’s Open Collective page as those become ready (which should be soon). We’ll still be using Nivenly-specific funds from her Ko-fi for Nivenly for the next 30-60 days and will follow up with an update as we start to stop that (manual 😅) process.