I think the biggest chunk of people directly benefiting from OSS are companies, for whom Patreon might be an inefficient intermediary. Personally, I'd prefer my

I think the biggest chunk of people directly benefiting from OSS are companies, for whom Patreon might be an inefficient intermediary. Personally, I'd prefer my employer funnel a few thousand dollars to the the FSF, Python Software Foundation, etc. than setup a Patreon donation for each project we use. (Maybe some big ones like Redis and nginx and BackboneJS should get direct donations, but now many npm packages do we use? Oh god, so many.) That said, if you maintain an OSS tool, please do set up an easy way to donate. When it's easy to donate a dollar or two, I do (well...occasionally). I've found very few developers have Patreon's setup. Some will have a PayPal link, which is especially nice for random online tools that I use once or twice. Most don't provide an easy opportunity to contribute financially. Though I guess I should keep more of an eye out for them. (While Googling for more info, I did come across https://github.com/feross/thanks https://github.com/feross/thanks -- so that's neat.)