Can I accept donates without been an entrepreneur or business?

Wacdis

Hi
As a developer, I design some SaaS projects and it’s opensource with ability to donate to developer. My question is in ability to accept donate payments with a card, and, if it’s possible, worldwide. Thanks!

Jakob-Y

Ross Alex I can you two things that you cannot do with bunq.me:

Accept card payments as a business. (Only the other payment methods are allowed according to business account ToS.)
Accept cards that are not European or from a few other select countries.

I haven’t seen anything that would explicitly forbid accepting donations for an open-source project.

New-Lilac-Sloth-1702461962

Yeah, technically it is possible. Just create a bunq.me link and share it. But it costs 2.5% per card payment and you have to take care for possible income taxes yourself (depending on the country you are living in).
And you may want to reach out to the bunq support and clarify whether receiving donation is against their terms of use or not. Maybe you have to use a business account for that.

Wacdis

Jakob So I can accept payments/donations from European accounts, not businesses?

Jakob-Y

Ross Alex Well, both are true:

You are only allowed to accept card payments via bunq.me as a personal bunq user.
On bunq.me, the payer can only use personal cards, not business cards.

And how to accept payments from non-eu accounts/cards like US/Canada?

Some non-EU cards are accepted, but not all. The country list is the same as for top-ups, shown here: https://together.bunq.com/d/19235 US and Canada shouldn't be an issue therefore.

But generally, bunq is not a full-blown PSP, so the feature is not really aimed at accepting random card payments from strangers worldwide, it's more for simplifying quick and easy payments from friends/family. As stated above, I'm not aware of your use-case being explicitly forbidden so it's probably fine, but not sure if it would give everyone the best payment experience.

Wacdis

And how to accept payments from non-eu accounts/cards like US/Canada?

thijsoost

Ross Alex PayPal maybe?

Wacdis

Thijs Paypal is good on paper only. In reality they recently block an account and you need to spend a lot of time to prove that you are not a donkey.

Jakob-Y

I would probably look at something like Liberapay, Ko-fi, Open Collective, GitHub Sponsors or even Patreon. Just in case you're interested in these kinds of suggestions.

Wacdis

Jakob Donation Collectors like Patreon have too big commission. Github Sponsors is a nice becase of 0 commission, but I didn’t read their rules.

Jakob-Y

Ross Alex That was literally the last example on my list though. You worry about commision, but with bunq.me I would honestly wonder if you get the same amount of donations in the first place. Not just because of regional restrictions, but also just because people would be more likely to use a service that they already know and maybe trust. It‘s not bunq‘s fault but they‘re „just“ an European neo-bank, not a service everyone in the open-source sphere knows about. I would rather get 80% of 100 USD than 97.5% of 10 USD.

Wacdis

Jakob Agree