Donation without Paypal

Hi there,

I don’t know how to get in contact other than via this post…

Anyway - Thanks for your great work on this great software!!
Because I got a very good result on a production of ‘Bach - Weihnachtsoratorium’ with ardour as recording and mixing software (on Ubuntu) I would like to donate (I’m located in Germany) …

But here is the Problem - I don’t use Paypal.
I tried to get a solution in the forum but there was none for this problem - at least I didn’t find one.

I really would like to donate, but is there no money transfer to a bank account in the states other than via Paypal?

Thanks again
-Andi

Sadly pretty much. You should be able to donate with a standard credit card without creating a paypal account IIRC, but the US doesn’t have the same bank transfer system that the EU does sadly.

Seablade

To echo what seablade said, the costs for wire transfer to the US from Europe are high enough that unless you planned to make an extremely generous donation, a huge part of the amount would get eaten by the bank(s). It would have been wise for me to have opened an account in Berlin when I was living there so that EU members could easily use the bank transfer system there, but unfortunately I did not. As he also noted, you can just use a regular credit card without any real use of PayPal - they will just act as my designated processor for the transaction (some company has to do that and PayPal’s rates are about as good as anybody else’s).

other systems of payment are becoming more important as the politics of paypal and other credit card companies are becoming distasteful to a large group of people. how about checks? would that be too cumbersome? probably there wouldn’t be a ton of transactions to deal with.

@mthed: checks are always an option for donations and subscriptions. How this circumvents the same financial systems that represent credit card companies, paypal and the banksters is not clear to me, nor how they can really play a role in global transactions. The world still desperately needs a good micro-payment system, and although PayPal is a moderately OK approximation, its still very far from the mark. Why do we not have such a system? My own feeling is that the banks do not want to see such a thing emerge because it would cause havoc to their operational and fee models. On the other hand, I think that most observers of systems like PayPal massively underestimate the hassle with security and fraud that they face, something which drives their costs up significantly past what a micro-payment model can really support. So something has to give here. Moving money from A to B at the present time involves interacting with nasty, greedy, arguably criminal banking establishments worldwide. If that prevents some people from helping to support Ardour development, I don’t see to many alternatives at the present time.

What is preventing you from opening a bank account in all major countries? Transferring money from one account to another within a country (at least in my country) is not very expensive.

@mixit: have you actually tried that? these days with The War on Terror™ its not such a trivial undertaking, especially when you plan to do it remotely. If I could tell a bank that I expected to have tens of thousands of <your currency here> it would probably be easy, but that would hardly be honest or wise.

Have you considered xe.com ?
I haven’t used it myself, but it’s been recommended by somebody whose opinion I’d trust.

@anahata: interesting suggestion, but there appears to be no option to use EFT from anywhere but the US and Canada. This means that people in Europe, South America, Africa or Asia would have to use a wire transfer to initiate payment, which is typically VERY expensive. xe.com looks like a great option for Americans and Canadians to pay the rest of the world; not so much the other way around.

@paul: i didn’t realize check were an option. i still owe you guys a donation for a fixed bug, maybe i’m missing instructions on how to do this somewhere? btw, i feel like i asked this in another thread, but is there a way to associate the donation with the bug fix?

oh, ignore the “btw” section of that last message. yes i did ask and seablade already answered :slight_smile:

Great! I already done my part and reach out for them. Thanks a lot guys.