SuttaCentral now has donations

SuttaCentral is now accepting donations.

In the past we did not set up a donations facility, as we had enough funds for our limited needs. Now, however, we are employing a full time developer, in addition to several other ongoing costs, such as typing the texts in several languages. So we have set this up to guarantee our future stability.

The work behind the scenes has been mainly done by Deepika, who has set up the SuttaCentral Development Trust. Details are on our Donations page.

The facility has been set up using the secure modern payment system, Stripe.

If you think SuttaCentral is amazing, now you can help us make it even better.

5 Likes

Nice to see the donation facility up!

One little point of consideration: might it be worth specifying which dollar contributions are to be made in? Coming from the UK myself, the question did arise ā€œis it USD or AUD?ā€ I presume it is AUD, but in this funky, ā€˜globalizedā€™ world one can never be too sure.

1 Like

Good point, thanks, weā€™ll look into this. @blake, I presume the payments are made in AUD, is this correct? Can you add this in there?

Yeah it really should, Iā€™m surprised I omitted that detail. It now says ā€˜AUDā€™ everywhere it should. As only about 1/4 our users are Australian and the largest user group is from the USA, it should definitely be spelled out that it is AUD.

4 Likes

:pray:

Dear Bhante,

I was just looking at the donation site. I read on the bottom that there are handling fees and conversion fee for donating in international currency. I donā€™t mind paying for handling fee but would there be a way to not to pay for the conversion since itā€™s really a donation for non-profit? I usually use paypal and I donā€™t get charged conversion fees when I give monetary dana to Dhammasara. Just wanted to know if the option was available here. Iā€™d rather add the conversion fee as dana.

with reverence, respect, and gratitude,
russ

:pray:

3 Likes

We use Stripe for payments, which offers a lot of advantages, but it doesnā€™t have a non-profit discount. They say theyā€™re looking at introducing one, though, so weā€™ll keep our eye out.

3 Likes

:pray:

Dear Bhante,

Thank you for your reply. :smile:

with reverence, respect, and gratitude,
russ

:pray:

:pray:

Dear @sujato,

I encountered an error with the donation:

A problem occurred

Your credit card details were accepted, but the transaction could not be completed. Please try another card, or contact your bank

Hopefully the donation went through. An amount is pending with my bank account.

Joyous vesak to all :heart_eyes:

with reverence, respect, and gratitude,
russ

:pray:

1 Like

I do not know what the problem is. Please check that there is no problem on your side. If not, we can confirm whether the payment has been registered with our account or not, but beyond that youā€™ll have to contact Stripe, who handle the payments.

:pray:

Dear Bhante,

Just found out earlier it was a fraud prevention process by my bank. Because it was an international transaction, they wanted to make sure it was authorized and wanted further confirmation by me. The donation should go through :grinning:

with reverence, respect, and gratitude,
russ

:pray:

1 Like

Just a thought on donationsā€¦

The Brave browser allows users to make micropayments to their favourite or most used websites/publishers using BATs. The concept is explained here:

Here is recent critic of the browser and reply by Brave, that sums up quite well the on-going issues but also the vision of this browser:

Has anyone used Brave and have opinions on it? (technical or ideological)

Anyway, Iā€™ve been using it for a while now and got some free BATs as it is a trial period, so I allocated them all to SuttaCentral of course :slight_smile:

Would such donations be of interest to the SuttaCentral team?

I suppose it might be too time-consuming for the team dealing with donations to collect and convert BATs into fiatā€¦ but in case you are interested you might want to register as a publisher with them and see what comes out of it.

To be honest, I still did not make my mind on this project and would welcome views from anyone who looked into itā€¦

(At least, their icon/symbol should please all our Sinhalese friends :anjal:)

2 Likes

Thanks for the suggestion, it looks like an interesting idea. Iā€™ll mark it down as ā€œhmm, watch this space.ā€