@cdonat literally zero people use that. Anything which requires installing yet another app is a non-starter.
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@Edent
The technical side of microtransactions is simple - anyone can add a button wherever. Getting a payment processor to perform the actual financial transaction has so far been more or less impossible.
The only payment processor that any fraction of people actually use are Visa/MasterCard - and they will change you ~30¢ + %5 per transaction, so you will lose money (be charged more than the tip is worth) on every tip you are sent that's under ~$1.
@duncanlock I don't know where you are in the world, but in the UK and Europe it is free to transfer a single penny to any account.
I use tap-to-pay on low value transactions all the time. I even bought a single apple from a greengrocer once!
@Edent @duncanlock Pretty sure there would be a merchant fee and the shop just ate it
@davidgerard @Edent @duncanlock Yes, the shop will have paid the transaction fee for this and it will have been a fairly large proportion of the payment.
Not as large in the UK as in the USA, but still a flat fee per transaction plus a percentage of the payment amount.
The payment providers that offer simple percentage pricing (eg. Square at 1.75% and SumUp at 1.69%) are able to do so because they insist on a minimum transaction amount of £1.
@steve @Edent @duncanlock yeah, lotta corner shops round here still say minimum £5. Even the ones that don't, i keep coins in my pocket so i can buy a drink or whatever without their share being eaten in card fees.
@davidgerard @Edent @duncanlock yes. Using cards (even non-credit cards) costs the seller money.
@davidgerard @duncanlock @tante
Not really. In the UK, I pay a fixed % for tap-to-pay card transactions.
SumUp charge as little as 0.99% whether you're charging £1 or £500. My corner shop prefers that I pay by card for a chocolate bar rather than a £20 note.
@Edent @davidgerard @duncanlock @tante SumUp's minimum payment amount in the UK is £1.
Their fees are rounded to a whole number of pennies per transaction using Banker's rounding (Round Half to Even).
@davidgerard @duncanlock @tante @steve ah, I misread their developer documentation.
I don't know which merchant my greengrocer uses, but they're able to charge less than a quid.
Of course, that's card-present. Looks like online payments still have a fixed fee overhead.
Thanks!
@Edent The "traditional" card terminal providers like Barclaycard, Dojo, Worldpay and so on will have fee structures that incorporate a fixed "authorisation fee" and then a percentage of the payment which are likely to be different for each class of card (matrix of credit, debit, domestic, international, special case for Amex); they will happily process transactions that cost the merchant more than the transaction amount. They tend to pay out gross daily and then invoice fees monthly.
@Edent think it would be great to something like this. Lots of creatives I'd like the option to easily tip. Could it be done in a client app?
Before I go and build something, does anyone have a template for all the payment services?
Looking for a bunch of buttons which are *consistent* in size / shape.
All the official ones seem to be as different as possible!
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@Edent
I don't know of any collection, that includes all these icons. Most lack liberapay, and opencollective.
Probably the easiest approach is, to get the monochrome logos from all of them, and build consistent HTML-buttons.
For OC I found it here: https://github.com/opencollective/opencollective-frontend/blob/main/public/static/images/oc-symbol.svg and for Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/about/logos Paypal, and Ko-Fi are here: https://github.com/sethcottle/littlelink/tree/main/images/icons though the Ko-Fi-Logo isn't monochrome. You might prefer FontAwsome here: https://fontawesome.com/icons/ko-fi?f=brands&s=solid
@cdonat see further down the thread.
Great, so I was late :-)
Maybe have a bit wider padding around the logos, and make the logos smaller. Like e.g. here: https://littlelink.io/
But that's like nitpicking ATM. It's not the most pressing issue, of course.
@cdonat it's all good feedback 😃
First pass at some visually consistent SVG banners - all using the official brand logos.
Thoughts?
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I'm experimenting with a "voluntary paywall" on my blog posts.
If you've enjoyed something I've written, or found it useful, feel free to chuck me a few quid or buy something from my wishlist.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/02/reputation-scores-for-github-accounts/#paywall
@Edent I just had a weird¹ idea.
Set prefs to require follower approval. When people donate, they somehow link their Fediverse handle (donation comment?), which then allows that follower request.
¹I didn't say it was a good idea.
@Edent do any of those accept crypto?
@Edent Wow, I was to send you a £1 tip just for fun and PayPal would have charged me a 0.99€ fee, which I refuse to pay out of principle. I'll check the other options.
@Edent Ko-Fi would let me use PayPal and seemingly stemmed the fee and had a fair pound sterling conversion rate, but then this error happened.
@Edent No luck. Ko-Fi didn't let me pay you with Google Pay, not with a credit card directly, and also not with a credit card powered by PayPal. The latter even went through the Verified by Visa thing that I confirmed, but it ended up at the same PayPal error message. Can't be arsed to sign up to something like Wire or any of the other options. I'll get you a drink should we ever meet. Promised.
@Edent Idle curiosity… Which of those services:
(a) sends the most of any payment to you? (fewest fees / deductions)
(b) do you prefer to receive funds from? (quickest / easiest / lowest maintenance etc if it's not the same answer as 'a').
@bensmithuk PayPal and Wise do no fees. Both are instant.
Ko-Fi is fee-free but I think takes a little time.
OpenCollective has fees and is slow.
Never received anything by LP, so no idea.
Amazon is usually next day 🙂
Honestly, I prefer receiving weird shit from Amazon - but they're all in the "fun money with low effort" camp.
@Edent @bensmithuk PayPal no fees? How? I get spanked by it here whenever one of my projects gets sent support.
@Scott @bensmithuk
User to User payments don't incur any fees.
If someone is buying something or sending money to a business / organisation then there are fees.
@Edent (I am guessing.) Your home made copies of corp branding for a project?
The multinationals (none consumer facing) I have worked for are very vigilant of their brand use. Not just look and feel, but were and how it is used. IME better ask them first.
@Edent Naively, looking at them cold, it might be useful if all of them had some kind of unifying common way to indicate that they are a way to tip/pay. This would allow users to get oriented quickly, even if they had never seen the platform that the person placing the badges has selected.
@tychotithonus yup. The idea they would be in a visually distinct box saying "pay me using…"
@Edent I've never used Ko-Wis Donen col. Are they any good?
@Edent shields.io has most of them already: https://shields.io/badges/open-collective-backers#
@liaizon they're so *ugly* though! No branding, tiny, and bland.
@Edent there are themes there and you can have the logos too, and they can be any size, as they output svg
@liaizon I'm obviously being a bit thick. I can't see any way to make, for example, a PayPal button that looks good. Very happy for you to tell me which magic command I need.
(its an svg so any size you like, also the colors are encoded in the url, if you don't like the pink choose any color you want)
paypal
https://img.shields.io/badge/paypal-donate-pink?style=for-the-badge&logo=paypal
kofi
https://img.shields.io/badge/kofi-donate-pink?style=for-the-badge&logo=kofi
liberapay
https://img.shields.io/badge/librapay-donate-pink?style=for-the-badge&logo=liberapay
open collective
https://img.shields.io/badge/opencollective-donate-pink?style=for-the-badge&logo=opencollective
cashapp
https://img.shields.io/badge/cashapp-donate-pink?style=for-the-badge&logo=cashapp
@liaizon Ah, I see. Sadly, they're all different widths and don't use the official fonts. So I'm not sure if they'll work for my purposes. But I'll give it a try - thanks 😃
@Edent hmmm, on the one hand, being able to give creatives payment for their work is a nice idea.
On the other hand introducing profit motive on posting is kind of a major reason commercial social media is so toxic. Do we want that incentive structure here?
@Edent I think it would be huge for folks who are often de-platformed because of their art or job, but I think we'd have to be _really_ careful with the potential for scams and malicious implementations because of the decentralized nature of the Fedi. Might need some form of mutual vouching or other safeguards against fraud...
@Edent I'm confused by the concept of paying/tipping for a particular post. I can't think of a single interaction I've had which would cross that threshold where I feel their comment or assistance was sufficiently helpful or valuable to me to send money.
But maybe something to tip instance admins?
