- Internet Archive, for the same reasons you do.

- LetsEncrypt, because I get a lot out of https

- Ironclad because I want to see more diverse monolithic OS kernels

- Alire because Ada's ecosystem is important to me

No Foreign Land, not an open source project, but essentially a free cruising guide for the whole world

What? This is news to me. Also What does it even mean?

https://www.fordfoundation.org/work/learning/research-report...

https://magit.vc/donate/

- Internet Archive

- Wikipedia

- Bandcamp - a bit off-topic but the music industry has become an exponentially distributed winner-takes-all game. I resist by buying underground music on Bandcamp - it's an exemplary web platform, gives generous cuts to the artist, and you own the files. Even if I only listen to the song a couple times it feels good knowing 80% of the money is going straight to talented artists and 20% is going to a beacon of hope on the internet. Money spent on Bandcamp feels good.

SPCA (and other cat shelters) in various places

https://nodezator.com/

because it was the first Python node editor which "just worked" out of the box when I tried to run it.

Based on a game dev system which was called Indie Python, the main site is now at:

https://indiesmiths.com/

I kick in to Wikipedia via Microsoft Rewards points whenever they are matching points, or if I have a surplus of Amazon gift card money 'cause there haven't been any Kindle book sales I bought into for a while.

Also F-Droid (Android apps), ACLU, Doctors without Borders, PBS.

- Octoprint

- Grayjay/Futo

- Internet Archive

- Opensubtitles

- The Guardian

I used to donate to Wikipedia, but for various reasons switched that donation to IA.

https://blog.darkmere.gen.nz/2024/12/donations-2024/

Projects I'm donating to (not every year):

  - Syncthing
  - Internet Archive
  - Python
  - Let's Encrypt
  - Electronic Frontier Foundation

Now for free stuff, they have to pay by donations, if they use Roundcube for email, there goes a shekel or two, if they use Linux, gotta pay up, wordpress? Yup, drama notwithstanding, here's a buck.

It may seem like a disadvantage commercially, but I have faith that having a direct line with these guys and growing a sponsor reputation with upstream projects will pay off in the future.

Now I'm working with a client who had a website that was dead, so her graphic assets pointed to a dead site which was not bueno. I used Internet Archive to help revive the site, so they're gonna have a 'tip' coming their way. Everything has its price and its worth!

- The EFF

- tridactyl: https://tridactyl.xyz/

- the ACLU

- the mastodon instance I use as primary

- ad hoc to magit.vc

- a bunch of non-tech

- WezTerm

- Signal

    - Signal
    - Wikipedia
    - MyNoise.net
    - various Emacs package maintainers
    - Internet Archive

It was my main learning resource when I was changing careers to become a software developer 8 years ago. It was a very successful career change, both financially and in regards to my satisfaction with my profession.

On a time when expensive courses and bootcamps were all the range, I feel like I wouldn’t have much better than this free resource. Thanks freeCodeCamp!

Signal

Pi-hole

F# Weekly

Pony

- Magit, needs no introduction

- Borkdude, a __massive__ Clojure ecosystem contributor

- JPMonettas, for their work on FlowStorm, an incredibly useful debugger/introspection tool for Clojure

- The CIDER project, Clojure once again

- NoahTheDuke, for their work on keeping my much beloved jinteki.net alive and we'll

All these people deserve your money imo

I still don't understand why is making LineageOS compatible with more phone models so hard compared to Linux distros in desktop, so I really appreciate all the work behind it.

- Wikipedia

DownThemAll, a browser extension that makes multiple simultaneous downloads from a page easy: https://www.downthemall.org/howto/donate/

Free Software Foundation (FSF): https://www.fsf.org/about/ways-to-donate

LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/

Mozilla Thunderbird: https://give.thunderbird.net/

Soundswitch (Windows application to switch default playback devices and/or recording devices using simple hotkeys): https://soundswitch.aaflalo.me/

Tab Session Manager browser extension: https://tab-session-manager.sienori.com/

Tor Project: https://donate.torproject.org/

VLC media player: https://www.videolan.org/contribute.html

Lichess (5-10$ every 3 months)

I also donated to these projects in the past:

DESEC

Homebrew

sharkdp (fd and batcat)

https://liberapay.com/F-Droid-Data/donate

immich: https://immich.app/

beszel: https://github.com/henrygd/beszel

Drones for Ukraine https://www.dronynemesis.cz/en

https://newpipe.net/donate/

I hear great things, i love the idea behind it, a 65 year habit is hard to break.

I'll be back soon.

I can count on three fingers the end-user software products that have changed my life. Linux, VIM, and Anki. They are built on shoulders of technology, but those are the three that I touch.

Thunderbird

NVDA

Tor

EFF

And no longer:

Wikipedia - they have enough

Mozilla - they don't invest in FF

Considering:

Internet archive

Notepad++

My criteria are mainly what I use in my everyday life and derive value from it. What can bring additional positive change in the world and or can bring postive change to other people who cannot afford to donate themselves.

- Free Software Foundation (FSF): https://www.fsf.org/about/ways-to-donate

- LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate/

Most of us live a busy life, and it's usually hard to stop for a moment and think of the many things around us that make living better, even if it's a tiny open source project that solves a little, almost unknown, problem, run by some random guy in Hungary or Minnesota or Sicily.

I'd bet that a fair number of us on HN have some form of disposable assets / money, and that a small donation will not ruin our lives. Some of us might have an even larger capacity to donate. It's nice when we find the time to appreciate something, and decide to support it at least with our money, if not with a bit of our time and effort.

Side note: I am worried about robots, and am actively looking for a project that could make robot OS or components or the AI/brain that drives them, more human and less harmful. If you know anything worth exploring, please share.

INaturalist, an incredible (community-driven) source of ecology information across the world, tools for identifying organisms, etc.

    - Hologram, an isomorphic web framework in Elixir by Bart Blast  
    - Torchlensmaker, differentiable optics with pyTorch by Victor Poughon

https://github.com/immich-app

- Homebrew (I mean, I use it multiple times daily…)

- Servo (long-term health of the web)

- Mastodon and the instance I use (if you pay you’re not the product)

• Internet Archive

• Local libraries

Projects I wish I could donate to:

• uBlock Origin

Sounds like an app idea. Who would use it?

Edit: Come to think of it, these are all projects that ask for money, but not often enough to be annoying. I bet I'd donate to KDE (or Gnome or NixOS) if I'd ever get a notification and it's a 1 min click-click-click experience.

The fastest GNU/Linux distribution available. Amazing set of patches, optimizations and specific device fixes. The community regularly finds performance regressions in the latest versions of packages and reports them upstream. Remember the NVIDIA explicit sync flickering issues? CachyOS had pushed the fixed driver before anyone else.

- https://objective-see.org/support.html (For https://github.com/objective-see/LuLu et al)

- https://www.thunderbird.net/donate (I hope none of it goes to Mozilla or Firefox. I also hope https://thundermail.com brings something than I can instead pay for, if I can or will decide to afford, instead of intermittent donations)

- https://www.borgbackup.org/support/fund.html (I would want to support https://restic.net as well as I use it so much but they never setup a way - it has been discussed :/)

- https://syncthing.net/donations

- https://github.com/Homebrew/brew#donations

- https://cryptomator.org/donate/

- https://www.patreon.com/db4s

- https://github.com/sponsors/qarmin for https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka

- https://github.com/sponsors/garethgeorge for https://github.com/garethgeorge/backrest

- https://keepass.info/donate.html and https://keepassium.com/donate (Mostly the latter) (I had actually moved to StrongBox which did a U-turn on FOSS and then sold to another company. At that point I came back to KeePassium. The KeepPassium author actually took a stand a went FOSS as a principle. I think this is worth noting.)

..and few more.

… …

# The ones I support by paying for one of its services bust mostly because its FOSS app:

- https://vorta.borgbase.com

- http://ente.io (But sadly not for long; because I really can't stand a non-native "photos" app. I just can't! Otherwise it's a great service!)

One of the best and widely-supported custom Android ROMs. Has a few features on top of Lineage OS and even GPay works out of the box on a rooted Pixel phone.

1. https://publicknowledge.org/about-us/

They might not be popular to use, but the absolute freedom of the software along with how simple it is written makes it an incredible “good” for studying OS design.

I have also donated to the FSFE (European FSF) and the Linux foundation, but we don’t get tax incentives for donating to charity in most european countries. So it’s quite costly.

Indirectly, buying ebooks from people on most programming languages ecosystems, graphics, cloud tooling, across all well known vendors.

I don’t always agree with them, but I feel like I’m strengthening the counter-side.

Still love the software, though

Anki/AnkiDroid Firefox Futo keyboard Espanso Expandroid Tubular NewPipe SponsorBlock Zen browser Freetube Linux Mint VLC LibreOffice

My salary is paid from donations to Zig Software Foundation, for which I am extremely grateful.

WACUP - DrO is building upon the parts of winamp that were open sourced around the Winamp 3 era and gradually building all the other parts (since Winamp was plugin based this is doable piece by piece).

Other: a couple of artists on patreon.

If I didn't have to work 5 days a week I might devote time to projects like these, since I can't donating some small amount £ feels right.

I somehow feel very motivated to make sure that the intellectual works that inspired the Renaissance, European Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution are accessible, both to people and for LLM pretraining.

- Wikipedia

- Used to donate to visidata and will probably again, if I need it for work again

Sioyek - PDF reader. I was happy to find it when it was still very new, and being among the firsts to donate to it. Pretty wholesome to see many have donated, a bit like seeing your favorite indie-band going big. https://sioyek.info/

Sometimes to feddit.org over OpenCollective

Thunderbird/Wikipedia intermittently

1) Debian: https://www.debian.org/donations

2) Anubis: https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/funding/

https://github.com/coollabsio/coolify

[0]https://join-lemmy.org/

[1]https://spritely.institute/

[2]https://asahilinux.org/

- Corejs + babel (donated after reading this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34859766

- Magisk . I root my Android phone because I believe that if I buy a device I should actually own it.

- Scummvm I believe in preserving computing history and scummvm does great work making older games accessible

- MisterFPGA. Instead of giving my 3 years old son a tablet, I've decided to set up MisterFPGA for him with an Amiga core for him to do kidpix and scummvm to run Adibou and the humongous games. I like the idea of him having access to a relatively simple system like the amiga where he can learn how computer work without having access to internet and learning to passively consume.

- Valetudo. I love having a robot cleaning my house. I do not love having something with a camera that's not purely local. Thanks to valetudo, I can use it without worrying about my privacy.

- Not directly a donation but I buy a yearly license to crossover to support wine development

- Calibre

- Syncthing

- The developer of Karabiner

- Internet Archive

- Free Software Foundation

I used to give to the following:

- Wikipedia (but stopped when I realized that they have more than enough donations and that I should focus on other worthy causes)

- Mozilla (but stopped when I saw the CEO increase her salary while firing and stopping important projects. I do not want a repeat of the IE monopoly with Chrome and as such I want Firefox to succeed but I have completely lost trust in Mozilla's management)

- https://archive.org

- http://wikipedia.org

We support over 60 projects in areas such as media bias, algorithmic/AI bias, protest tech, and boycotting, which are pushing back against these initiatives. Donations are very much appreciated

https://techforpalestine.org/donate/

Usually I pick the way I want to spend money at the moment and give them to someone who satisfies the criteria.

I wanted to donate a bit every month but didn’t manage to get the habit.

I want to donate to projects like XFCE and the Free Software Foundation.

FreeFileSync, an excellent file sync utility within a network.

https://freefilesync.org/

StemRoller, separate stems (e.g., voice) from songs.

https://www.stemroller.com/

John's Background Switcher, shuffle wallpapers from various sources

https://johnsad.ventures/software/backgroundswitcher/

Wikipedia Foundation

Etc.

- Kiwix

- Singlefile

- Home Assistant

- Zulip

- Asahi Linux

- OpenZFS

- Django Foundation

And a handful of YouTubers / patreon ppl.

https://github.com/gleam-lang/

Open Source and Internet

  - Internet Archive [important would be some pro bono legal help due to the recent turn of events, perhaps]

  - Wikipedia [no need at the moment? Some say "overfunded  compared to others"; has anyone checked?]

  - Ladybird Web browser [coming to you in 2026: the first non-corporate Web browser from scratch; some said it couldn't be done; but those did not know Andreas Kling]

  - International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement

  - Greenpeace

  - Amnesty International

  - UNICEF

When doing this it is important to communicate clearly if these are one-off contributions or if the projects can expect an annual contribution. Sadly, I didn't trust the bean counters at my employer, so I made it clear that "these are one off contributions - do not plan for future contributions from XYZ Corp". Still we managed to contribute for a handful of years.

(They stopped contributing after I left the company. Actually, the entire division, bean counters and all, was scrapped. And sadly, they did not communicate that they would stop funding these projects. This is unfortunate)

and I guess NabuCassa / homeassistant, but that's also in exchange for remote backups. Still, I want them to stay alive.

- PHP Foundation.

- Drupal Association - I started my career with Drupal. Although I rarely use Drupal anymore, it feels right.

I wish I could donate to uBlock Origin, but the developer doesn't seem to accept donations last time I checked.

I think the Open Street Map is also well worth donating, I'm going to pretty soon.

OpenBSD

Sourcehut

It's one of the few open source projects (besides Blender and GIMP) that is used directly by non-technical end-users and that has managed to surpass its commercial brethren , both in features and popularity. This is partly due to its extreme, almost Emacs-like hackability and a vibrant plugin ecosystem, which provides everything from better speech synthesizers to accessibility enhancements for other apps.

It has been created by two guys in Australia, mostly in response to the outrageous prices of commercial screen readers (~$1500 for noncommercial use). The situation has gotten better since then, Windows now comes with Narrator, which is... usable, but NVDA is still the top contender for most (non-enterprise) use cases.

[1] https://www.nvaccess.org/support-us/

Content creators

- Sci Show https://www.youtube.com/scishow

- Escape Artists (short fiction podcasts) https://escapeartists.net/

- Technology Connections https://www.youtube.com/technologyconnections

- The Bible Project https://bibleproject.com/

- Liliputing https://liliputing.com/

- Radiotopia (99% Invisible & other podcasts) https://www.radiotopia.fm/

- PBS (local station) https://thinktv.org/

Online Services

- Internet Archive https://archive.org/

- Wikipedia https://www.wikipedia.org/

- Snopes https://www.snopes.com/

- MetaBrainz Foundation https://musicbrainz.org/

Justice

- Equal Justice Initiative https://eji.org/

- Innocence Project https://innocenceproject.org/

- International Justice Mission (IJM) https://www.ijm.org/

- Institute for Justice https://ij.org/support/give-now/?

Advocacy

- Right to Repair https://www.repair.org/

- Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) https://www.eff.org/

- Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) https://sfconservancy.org/

- Free Software Foundation (FSF) https://www.fsf.org/

Making the world a better place

- Partners in Health https://www.pih.org/

- World Central Kitchen https://wck.org/

Software

- ESLint https://eslint.org/

- FreshRSS https://freshrss.org/

- Open WRT (managed by SFC) https://openwrt.org/

- Mozilla Foundation (Firefox) https://www.mozilla.org/

Ad-blocking

- Pi-hole https://pi-hole.net/

- osid.nl domain blocklist https://www.patreon.com/sjhgvr

- Peter Lowe's domain blocklist https://www.patreon.com/blocklist

- Steven Black's blocklist https://github.com/sponsors/StevenBlack

- Ajayyy (SponsorBlock) https://sponsor.ajay.app/

Local (Troy, OH)

- Health Partners Free Clinic https://www.healthpartnersclinic.org/

- Brukner Nature Center https://www.bruknernaturecenter.com/

Past ones include VLC, Retroarch, mGBA, UNHCR, and some more local things

The other worse offender is projects like MinIO that removed over 100k lines, to push everyone towards "Pro" which costs 75 thousand a year. What? You had it in the previous version, 100% for free.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44095612

Unicef

UNRWA

SaveTheChildren

Greenpeace

Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders

Amnesty

Since then the only donations I've made have been in support of the Crystal language.

I should spend some time this week reflecting on this.

You can offer your time, coding skills, feedback, design expertise, or simply help by spreading the word. In a world overflowing with information, visibility is a valuable form of support.

Choosing to boycott what doesn't align with your values is often underappreciated but can be very impactful.

Personally, I prefer to reshare and promote the projects I believe in. It's not about financial contributions—it's about increasing their reach. Sometimes, that's what makes the most significant impact.

Here are a few projects worth highlighting: Monero, ProtonMail, Briar.

- reticulum.network, as I want the code to get audited as soon as possible - many youtubers that fight against enshitification and for spreading critical thinking mindset.

https://opencollective.com/ionide

- QubesOS

- FSF

- Institute for Justice

    - magit
    - endeavouros
    - sometimes random helper tools when they save my ass
    - some opencollective member group I forgot
    - did give to wikipedia but their 'in your face' style pushed me away after 2 years

Neovim

local cat shelter

However, there are also some local (German in my case) organizations I have donated to.

1. GFF - Gesellschaft für Freiheit (anti surveillance and pro digital civil rights in the EU and Germany) [1]

2. Frag den Staat (platform enabling easy freedom of information requests in Germany and their publishing in addition to related digital civil rights activities) [2]

[1] https://freiheitsrechte.org/en/ [2] https://fragdenstaat.de/ (German only)

With that said we are looking at a new corporate structure for my business to increase the way we give back

- I donate to Wikipedia every year a small amount.

- It is not related to programming directly, but I try to donate to https://u24.gov.ua every month.

- OpenBSD

- The Pirate Bay

- Wikipedia

- Radicle - IPFS - torrents and magnet links - i2p - syncthing - PeerTube/ActivityPub

&al

I will probably also donate to FreeCAD and postgres but I have not checked if they accept donations.

I would like to single out KiCAD as the most impressive open source (?) project if you are into electronic design.

Haiku (because I was a first day BeOS user and I still miss that OS every day)

KDE (Daily driver and boy do I hate using Gnome)

Keepass2Android (essential, use it 20x per day)

Bottles (most robust and easy to use way to run windows games on my Linux box for me)

- Other projects:

Wikipedia (I'm don't 100% align with some of the politics internally and externally, as well as their spending on sidehustles, but regardless there's just no substitute)

ScreenScraper.fr (because I like neatly organized retro games)

- Today I learned:

Thunderbird donating to thunderbird only supports Thunderbird, so I'll start.

Internet Archive Even though some of the stuff they are doing is legally dubious, in general I'd say the initiative is a force for good. Considering support.

- What I wish I was able to support:

OpenSUSE I use this distro every day, but I don't have the time to invest in the community other than some well written bug reports and packaging feedback every now and then.

Firefox and MDN docs Oh boy do I have zero trust in Mozilla as an organisation, but the browser and the MDN docs are so fundamentally important to me. Regardless, I just can't bring myself to support the organisation with the current CEO.

My other donations go out monthly to Internet Archive, EFF, and Thunderbird.

There for a while, The TOR Project had a thing where I could contribute by running (paying for) a node on a hosting provider (I think it might have been AWS?). That effort died on the vine and was shut down.

For content creators, I donate to Phoronix.

- KeePassXC

- KDE

- Ladybird Browser

- Khan Academy

- qBittorrent

- Actual

I'm planning on having a fixed budget and giving the same amount to all of them.

https://www.keybr.com - shows ads if you want to use it for free or you can pay a small fee to remove ads. The code is open-sourced so you can make your own. Helped me get the hang of split keyboards and was money well spent to support.

https://enso.sonnet.io - ingenious idea that has helped me write without loosing focus editing myself. The solo developer guy shares an entertaining blog full of illustrations and rich content. his project is available to download in full from Gumroad for a small one time fee.

If there’s any projects you know of like these please share them!

Projects

- Thunderbird (daily driver in my job)

- Debian (also daily driver in my job)

- FreeBSD (daily driver)

- LadyBird Browser (first "real new" browser since ~20 years, privacy first, open source)

Lobbies / Organisations

- The Chaos Computer Club (CCC): Advocate digital rights, Public Awareness and Education, Legal and Ethical Guidance (Advantage: Network, Learning, Nice People)

- Any political part you like: ... (Network, Learning, Nice People)

- The Zentrum für Politische Schönheit (Center for Political Beauty): Human Rights Advocacy etc.

And I go to Conferences and Meetups and pay for it (also when they are free, since i have some money)

Before also:

- FSF

- EFF

- Tor

- Firefox

I'd like to donate to FreeCAD at some point, but the last time I had spare money to do that, I ended up paralyzed trying to figure out what would be the most impactful way to do so. Then Ondsel came and made a subscription the obvious choice (I thought) then they went away.

Ones that I probably should donate to but just haven't gotten to: Inkscape Gimp uv/ruff/ty

There are probably many more. My goal is to at least donate to any project that I make money from, preferably in a similar amount to what I might be paying otherwise. That is an awful lot to track down though, considering how many pieces there are for doing software development. Thus, I've been more focused on media and other engineering tools.

- Servo: Because I think browser engines are critical infrastructure for the web, and we are in dire need of one that is easily maintained, secure, embeddable, and isn't beholden to Google.

- Signal Foundation: Because our chat platforms and governments are spying on us, and Signal offers an alternative.

[1] https://hackerspaces.org

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

It changes over time but currently Vue and FastEndpoints (the C# http toolkit).

There are major forces in the world trying to shut them down through defamation and they badly need funding to continue helping people in gaza.

It's my favorite desktop environment and application suite, and I use it both at home and profesionally