While I liked Flattr I doubt that it's a sustainable service: It's a huge vendor lock in, like iTunes, but without a large user base/customers that are probabl

While I liked Flattr I doubt that it's a sustainable service: It's a huge vendor lock in, like iTunes, but without a large user base/customers that are probably worth to accept the terms and conditions and the vendor lock in. Flattr is popular only among a specific kind of websites: Here in Germany, flattr users are probably podcasters and bloggers. Even as a popular site your traffic/audience is much smaller than in the US or global, so ad-driven sites and even flattr isn't going to work. Large content producers, like the Axel Springer Verlag, recently started an "inhouse" SSO subscription platform. No dependencies except CC providers. No 30% charges. Full control. Even as a high profile community person with 5000+ Flattrs, you can't live from that e.g. it brings in maybe 2500€/month but those very few people work a lot and invest a lot in technology. So i doubt this is enough. Also, nobody knows how long it will last. The subscription functionality was implemented as auto-expiring and changed only a few months ago (iirc)… With lots of cheap and easy payment providers (like Stripe), paypal and bitcoins it became quite easy to accept "real donations" e.g. 10€+