For the sites which are hosted on Discourse, would it be possible to add a way for people to help pay for the hosting fees directly? So rather than someone giving the money to administrators on the hosted site and then the site administrators paying Discourse, could someone instead give the money directly on Discourse to be a credit into the account for the site? Sometimes sites cannot support themselves directly through ads or whatever and they may ask the members for financial help. Rather than all the sites having to manage those financial headaches themselves, they could just ask their members to go to Discourse and make a contribution to their hosting fund on Discourse.
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That would be turning Discourse (CDCK) into a sort of financial broker/distribution service. That’s not something I think Discourse would be keen on doing. It could make them responsible for thousands (or more) of financial transactions. Some along the line of PayPal would be better suited for this. Handling financial transactions on this scale would be a large and separate business endeavor for Discourse.
- Site owner creates a PayPal account;
- Site owner puts a donation link on their forum.
- Members who wish to donate click on the link, and
- PayPal takes it from there.
The only thing remaining is having the details of auto-renewal setup between Discourse and your financial institution (bank, credit/debit card, etc.).
PayPal is already set up to do these financial transactions. This would distract Discourse from its core idea of making the software even better than it already is - especially when there are “Card Declined” issues. It’s like asking Discourse to duplicate PayPal’s purpose (or any other similar money exchange site). 
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Have you seen, Discourse Subscriptions plugin? Pretty sure that can also do one-time charging of “products.”
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Hey @filmore 
As Craig said the Discourse subscription plugin is what you are looking for in your case. There is a new campaign feature which allows you to ask your community for help.
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I would guess that you’d need to be on an enterprise plan to get that to happen. 
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Another alternative is to make a patreon and link that.
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I second patreon.
The plug-in is very good and provides an incentive for people to donate. I like how it directly integrates into discourse.
You can provide full transparency to your community (which was important to me).
What made me hesitant at first was that it promotes a monthly subscription model rather than one off donations. I doubted my self that people would be prepared to regularly donate.
I was wrong. Using patreon helped make my site sustainable long term. Especially as it grew and costs escalated.
People are happy to donate for support knowing it is a community (important word), that there are no adverts, and increasingly important knowing we are not like Facebook and don’t harvest people’s data.
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Even with seeing plugs for Patreon on some YouTube videos, I always seem to forget about that. 
I may even consider that for my forum.
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Nope – it’s available on Business.
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Hi everyone,
Looking into the same use case I’ve come up using QR codes to allow users to make a donation. It works for my audience since I am in EU and most banks support the SEPA standard.
You can create the QR codes here: https://epc-qr.eu/. The url it generates is dynamic and you can tweak it to suit your needs. It yields the QR code image and the markdown then brings the resulting picture file into your assets. This process I like because that will be less vulnerable to tampering than keeping the url.
There are other providers but this ‘official’ one I like because it adds transaction reference, account number, benificiary and amount to the code so people can check in their mobile app it matches the data on the QR code (some level of fraud protection). You can also strip that if you like by the way.
I made a nice post indicating best things in life are free, but maintaining the site is not. Then outlined the nature of the cost and offering everyone the option to make a donation of either 5, 10 or 20 euro, depending on what you can afford and how much value you feel you get. I have indicated donators become ‘member’ get a shine on their avatar and get to decide what any surplus should be invested in (I’m not for profit). E.g. donate it to some charity or fund some plugin etc.
Should give it some time to see how it works but I like it so far as it is:
- free of charge
- robust and easy to explain
- easy to implement, no plugins to involve
- you can get notified through your bank app
What I don’t like:
- only for EU/SEPA audience. though that is 99% of my crowd. People can of course wire money directly if they get in touch. Don’t know if there is a similar QR-based system that spans globally?
- An improvement would be to make it more interactive. Was thinking a combobox to enter the amount for the donation, perhaps add data of the originator/donor etc. If we could do that using simple HTML or embedded code in a post that would be best. Building a plugin is also possible for other people but I kind of like the no frills approach of this.
Have other people approached it in a similar fashion?
Koen
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Regardless of your hosting provider it is a very good idea in general to monetize your Discourse.
It’s probably not going to make you rich but it does mean a couple of things:
- If you are lucky you will be able to cover your hosting fees.
- You can contribute to the ecosystem economy by supporting developers to create addons or add features to existing ones that you wish existed.
For this purpose I have used:
a PayPal button for voluntary donations
…for a while on one of my sites. (so in agreement with @JimPas)
It used to attract quite a lot of donations and the odd eye-opening one!
I’ve noticed that the more I get involved in that community (rather than just support it technically), the more donations I get. Visibility is quite key. Otherwise people treat it like any online free social media … instead of one stewarded (and paid for!) by key individuals.
Oh yeah, the fees they charge are a crime …
Affiliate links
These net a small recurring income but it’s not been a runaway success always. I have had the odd big win with these too though. It really may depend on the subject matter of your site. If you support car enthusiasts and post some appropriate affiliate links, it could be a good earner …
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