Hi, I'm one of the Snowdrift.coop cofounders. We actually planned on a wallet approach early on, and still consider it the superior option in many ways Not all

Hi, I'm one of the Snowdrift.coop cofounders. We actually planned on a wallet approach early on, and still consider it the superior option in many ways Not all), but we're launching with a monthly charge model because holding money is more complicated legally. To avoid higher fees for microtransactions, we're delaying donations until they total high enough to keep fees below 10%, then doing one charge for several months (ie, charging in arrears). You don't need a wallet approach to do one-click, though. Just the ability to do many:many charges, which several payment platforms support (usually under "services for ecommerce platforms", like Stripe connect, if I'm remembering the name correctly). That lets you send one bill to each patron that totals their donations to projects, and one paycheck to each project, that totals all the individual donations from various patrons, avoiding a fee per patron-project-month combination. --- Broadly, we don't agree that friction is the core barrier to donations (although lower friction certainly helps!). Instead, we think the barrier is people's reluctance to be the first to donate. Colloquially: people would pitch in if they knew it would lead to enough funding to be useful (ie, actually pay full time developer salaries), but nobody wants to be the chump wasting their money on 2 minutes of developer time per month (which will really be 0 minutes per month, because you can't hire 0.01% of a developer). That's why crowdmatching donations start small and grow as more people support the same project as you. Coming back to the article, I'd argue that both big and small projects alike have trouble soliciting donations from individuals (for the reason above). The difference is, large infrastructure projects can solicit funding from large companies that depend on them. These companies can donate enough money to single-handedly make a difference, so there's no coordination problem. Consider LibreOffice: they're a large project, and their potential audience is even larger. But, their primary benefactors are end users, and they struggle to make ends meet. Snowdrift.coop won't address the small-project funding issue right away, since in order to actually get launched some time this decade we're restricting our initial scope to large projects with the potential to really change the software landscape if they were well funded -- but we do want to expand our focus later, both to smaller projects and areas outside of software, like journalism, music, and research, which suffer from similar coordination problems.