Feminist reviews of payment processors

Background

There is no simple answer for which tool to use to raise and collect money for feminist causes. Common issues requiring compromise include:

• needing or wanting to receive payments from a wide variety of countries
• needing or wanting to receive payments from people who do/do not have credit cards
• needing or wanting to receive payments without incorporating, or registering for charitable giving tax status

This page reviews various payment mechanisms on both politics and features, which may assist your choice.

Questions to ask

Politics:

• History of explicit support of activists using their service? If not, are they neutral or hostile?
• Is payment for sexual content/pornography/sex work against their terms of use (this is common and may prevent some activists and many open content web sites using them)?
• What are the politics of their founders/investors?

Features:

• Payments accepted from donors/customers around the world y/n?
• Payments made to recipients around the world y/n?
• One-off payments supported y/n?
• Recurring payments supported y/n?
• What's their minimum transaction?
• What are their fees for small transactions?
• Do they require/encourage incorporation?
• Do they limit donations (no concrete goods or services in return) to registered non-profits or charities?
• Do they have a history of freezing accounts?
• How can people make payments? (Credit card, bank transfer, cash)?

Payment providers

Paypal

Politics

Traditionally Paypal have been extremely hostile to activist groups and readily respond to FBI and big bank requests to block accounts. See PayPal 14, The Prosecution of Free Speech PayPal actively discriminates against sex workers. See How PayPal discriminates against Sex Workers, PayPal blocks the accounts of porn professionals

• Peter Theil is seen as Libertarian, supports Ron Paul, is also a founder of Palantir, a group that spied on Wikileaks, and is a member of the highly secretive Bilderberg Group.

• Elon Musk is a technological progressive (SpaceX, Telsa Motors, Mars missions)

• Reid Hoffman appears to be progressive, investing in a number of projects around education and immigration reform, and serves on the board of organisations like Kiva. Editorial note: he is an investor in Wikia.

Features

• Payments accepted from donors/customers around the world? Yes.
• Payments made to recipients around the world? Yes.
• One-off payments supported? Yes.
• Recurring payments supported? Yes, for a monthly fee of at least $20 on top of transaction fees.
• What's their minimum transaction? It appears to be the minimum in local currency, eg USD $0.01 in the USA.
• What are their fees for small transactions? Free for "family and friends" transfers, otherwise 2.4% of the transaction, paid by receiver as a deduction from the incoming funds.
• Do they require/encourage incorporation? Not required, may provide some proof against account freezes.
• Do they limit donations (no concrete goods or services in return) to registered non-profits or charities? No.
• Do they have a history of freezing accounts? Yes, Paypal is notorious for freezing funds for a long period of time (especially on the grounds of accepting donations for what Paypal considers to be a fraudulent cause), and upon occasion insisting account holders refund all customers while absorbing fees.
• How can people make payments? (Credit card, bank transfer, cash)? Credit card and bank transfer.

Stripe

• Payments accepted from donors/customers around the world? Yes.
• Payments made to recipients around the world? Limited - 25 countries, 10 of which are in public beta, six of which are in private beta (https://stripe.com/global)
• One-off payments supported? Yes.
• Recurring payments supported? Yes, for free.
• What's their minimum transaction? $0.50
• What are their fees for small transactions? 2.9% + 30c (no micropayment pricing), less with high monthly volume
• Do they require/encourage incorporation? Yes (require.)
• Do they limit donations (no concrete goods or services in return) to registered non-profits or charities? No
• Do they have a history of freezing accounts? No.
• How can people make payments? (Credit card, bank transfer, cash)? Credit card, ACH (bank transfer), Bitcoin, AliPay

Gratipay (formerly Gittip)

Gittip was the financial contribution processor of choice for several Geek Feminism users, before the Gittip crisis prompted several people and organisations to abandon Gittip.

Thereafter, Gittip rebranded as Gratipay, and adopted:

• a code of conduct based on the Django project's code of conduct (see code of conduct evaluations);

• a management model for handling harassment based on the Ada Initiative's model.

Gratipay is currently a for-profit organisation. It is considering becoming a co-operative.

Snowdrift.coop

• Steered early on by Nina Paley.

• Code licensed under the AGPLv3+.

• Compliant with the FSF's FreeJS/LibreJS initiative.

• Currently in alpha and in need of coders!

FOSS Factory

• Code licensed under the AGPLv3+.

• Currently in beta and in need of coders!

BountySource

Pros

• Code licensed under the MIT License (not as good as AGPLv3, but at least still FLOSS).

• Seems to be active with quite a big community.

• Allows a bounty to be attached to any issue in more or less any mainstream bug tracker (e.g. Bugzilla, GitHub, etc).

Cons

• No apparent anti-harassment framework or safety policy.