Donations for developers
Donations for Open Source Projects on a WordPress Site
Open source maintainers spend hours answering issues, reviewing pull requests, and shipping releases. A donation page on the project website is a small but meaningful way to let users contribute back, without making the project look commercial.
Why a donation page belongs on the project site
The project website usually already has documentation, a changelog, and a download page. Adding a “Support this project” page in the same place keeps the conversation in one location and reduces the friction of donating from a tool readers already trust.
A WordPress site makes this easy: a normal page, a Gutenberg block, and a donation form become the support page.
Be transparent about what the funds are for
Open source donors want to know how the money will be used. Hosting costs, paid bug fixes, documentation work, or simply “more time on the project” are all valid answers, as long as they are stated clearly.
A short paragraph with concrete examples builds more trust than a generic “support our work” line.
One-time tips and recurring sponsorships
Some users want to send a one-time thank-you after a fix that saved them hours. Others prefer a small monthly contribution to support continued maintenance. FundCollector Pro supports both, with a subscriptions dashboard for the recurring side.
Offering both options in the same form makes the page useful for a wider audience.
Keep an honest donor list
If you want to acknowledge sponsors publicly, ask for explicit permission in the form, then keep a clean list in WordPress. FundCollector stores donor records in the admin area, so the public list can be exported and curated manually.
Never publish donor data without consent. The opt-in is part of the trust contract.
Connect releases and updates to the donation page
Each release note is a soft invitation to support the project. A small footer link to the donation page in the changelog or release announcement is usually enough. Aggressive banners on every page tend to backfire.
FundCollector lets you reuse the same form across multiple pages with a shortcode, without duplicating data.
Costs that do not eat into donations
The plugin itself does not take a percentage from each contribution. FundCollector Pro is a fixed 59 USD per year, which is easy to plan even for small projects with irregular donations.