The fifth year of Liberapay

Today is the 5th anniversary of Liberapay’s launch. Like every anniversary, it’s an occasion to reflect on the past year.

What’s changed

There hasn’t been any major change since the deployment of automatic renewals last year, but many smaller things have been fixed or improved. Here is a list of some of those changes:

• A dedicated Privacy page has been created, and several other pages and notifications have been improved to clarify various things.
• The accessibility of the Liberapay website has been improved for people who use screen readers.
• The maximum payment amounts have been increased for confirmed donors, to facilitate larger contributions from businesses. (#1919)
• Descriptions have been added to the payments that creators see in their Stripe accounts. (#1913)
• The ability to prevent others from pledging has been removed, but people who can’t or don’t want to use Liberapay can still “opt out”. (#1881)
• The barriers that prevented connecting multiple accounts of the same social platform to a Liberapay profile have been lifted. (#1787)

Additionally, Stripe became available in six more European countries: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czechia, Hungary, Malta, and Romania. The creators in those countries can connect a Stripe account to make it easier for their patrons to support them.

What’s been the same

Liberapay’s growth rate has been steady in 2020: the number of active users and the sum of donations have more than doubled again this year.

What’s next

The implementation of new features is currently on pause as I am attempting to migrate the Liberapay website and its database from Amazon servers in Ireland to OVH in France (#1727). However, I’m hoping that at least one big feature will be implemented later this year.

What you can do

Liberapay’s development could be faster if a second Python developer joined the team, but we’ve never had enough income to properly remunerate two developers, so make sure that you’re donating to the Liberapay team if you have the means.

That’s all for today, thank you for reading.