Patreon can go F....ar away.

I'm a supporter on patreon, and was that before joining the forum, my understanding was simply that I'd be supporting great hardware development, there are other patreons I follow to get actual stuff, but for Espruino I simply do it to support, can't speak for others though :)

Thanks, that's great to hear! (Also sorry - I'll update it so you get marked as a Patreon supporter :)

Being a supporter does really help me - I just tend to spend pretty much all my time on the firmware or support, and not on Patreon updates... I think I probably just need to look at the Patreon description and ensure it's clear about what I actually do :)

That's what we're paying you to do 😉
Firmware and support that is (and hardware once the world starts making sense again 😆)

I for myself use Github sponsors. You only have the payment gateway fees but no extra platform fees like Patreon. You can set up tiers for monthly and one-time payments or allow custom amounts. Define goals and send updates to your sponsors. In addition, you have a nicely integrated sponsors badge on Github for your profile.

I sent you a few bucks via Paypal, pretty fun to work on the BangleJS watch so far.

Thanks! Github sponsors is interesting... It seems Micropython is doing extremely well out of that: https://github.com/sponsors/micropython

... but that may be more a side-effect of the way micropython seems to be built into a lot more stuff.

I do have a sponsor link set up on GitHub that goes to Patreon, but I'm not using Github's own system. As we were talking about above really, I've just got so many different things set up already it's pretty hard to keep track. Obviously if it'd bring in a bunch of donations that's great, but I wonder whether enough people would use GitHub but not Patreon to make it worthwhile... (obviously not paying a bunch of platform fees would be nice though!)

I'm embarrassed by the over 20% extra tax on my donations on Patreon. I don't understand why the donation should be taxed at all? There should be a minimum platform commission and that's it.

Therefore, in addition to Patreon, I would prefer another convenient way to donate, but without a large commission. I would try Github sponsors or some kind of cryptocurrency.