As a counter-opinion, I prefer the way Gittip is set up so far. Small-but-recurring donations seem to be a better long-term model than larger-donations-in-bursts. (For examples of the latter struggling, there's Wikipedia and OpenBSD, both of which have to spend significant resources on collecting money on a regular basis, which is a distraction from what they would rather be doing.)

I'm a member of the Long Now Foundation, which charges a small amount to me every month. I've almost certainly donated more to them in this way than I would have in a one-time payment, and yet it still feels less painful to me. Win-win.

Gittip looks to me like it's trying to be more than just a reward system ... it's trying to be another way to sustain active contributors to open source.

Keeping the donations anonymous helps keep people from expecting to have leverage over open source contributors, which I think is a good idea.

Gittip is designed to pay the mortgage for donees, and mortgages are recurring. I expect we'll mix in one-offs eventually. Here's the ticket for that:

https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/5

Donations are anonymous in the particulars but public in aggregate on the homepage by default.

Many devs don't have recurring income. It'd be good if i was able to simply say "10% of every invoice I send gets sent to gittip for me to distribute amongst the projects I used to generate the work in this invoice."

Freshbooks Integration?

Ticketed with comments: https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/196

There is a way to cancel later right? I mean, even if you intend to give every week... eventually there will come a time where a person will need to stop doing that. We've all fell on hard times at one point or another and forced to make cut backs. Unfortunately, that often means being less "charitable".

If you can't turn off a recurring donation, then that just upped the giver's commitment level from "chicken" to "pig".

If you can turn off a recurring donation, then at least there is a work around for much shorter runs, like... 1 week. :)

You can set individual gifts to zero. They're collected together on your profile page:

https://www.gittip.com/about/me.html

You can also turn off gifts entirely without actually forgetting them by deleting your credit card:

https://www.gittip.com/credit-card.html

Is that satisfactory?

Thanks. So it seems that if a person wanted to just give once, there is a series of steps involved that would allow them to do that in a roundabout way. Maybe that is using Gittip in a way not intended, but it would satisfy the OP's need of a one time gift option.

Correct. Thanks for pointing that out.

thanks for the answer! what is the point of forcing anonymity per-donation?

gittip is more like a recurring research grant than a traditional salary. if i'm not dictating the work i'm paying for, i think it makes sense to know who, as a maintainer, your supporters are.

The idea is for gifts to be no-strings-attached. Not knowing who exactly your donors are means you're more free to pursue your own vision rather than someone else's. The idea is that you're being productive on your own terms, and "society" is rewarding you for your productivity.

Along with this, the ability to set start and end dates for recurring tips would be great. Build in notifications if a recurring tip is set to stop soon so I can reconsider my donations.

Ticketed: https://github.com/whit537/www.gittip.com/issues/195

To the designers of gittip- I have refrained from donation on the two occasions I felt compelled to, because the tip is recurring, and I don't want to forget that I'm paying someone every week. That was my brief thought process. I speak for only me, but figured you would like to know. Good luck!