Thread

It wasn't quite good enough and has very high latency which makes it unsuitable for use with TalkBack. We're making this because existing options including Sherpa don't meet our requirements. Otherwise, we could have forked those. It made more sense to make our own instead which we'll be able to continue improving long term. It's similar to our network location and geocoding implementations where we want things done a particular way focused on high quality in all areas we care about.

We have a bunch of donations options including local bank transfers with very low fees via Wise or sending money via Wise itself which has no fee if it's a matching currency. We already have a lot of options and adding more results in higher costs for managing it and handling accounting. We have to spend a huge amount of money on accounting and also auditing. The more complex the finances, the more money we'll need to spend on that. Why not use bank transfers or Wise?

GitHub Sponsors provides credit card donations with 0% fees for donations from individuals which isn't something we can get elsewhere. The fees elsewhere are often over 5% when currency conversion is taken into account. We don't want to move more of the donations to high fee platforms. We have PayPal as a donation method but our donate page tries to make sure people understand the high fees and that it's better to donate another way such as GitHub Sponsors, Wise or bank transfers.

Truth be told, I’ve never heard of Wise until this very moment, and I wouldn’t be surprised if many others haven’t either. But really the reason I ask is because, for many, these are very recognizable channels through which supporting a project “just makes sense.” When onboarding friction is lower, more people usually donate because they can just use a familiar system. I only asked because I felt having those might lead to more donos, rather than personal need!

LiberaPay isn't used much based on

Recipients - Explore - Liberapay

. GrapheneOS likely receives more monthly donations than the total amount going through LiberaPay based on past numbers they've given on the total going through it. We were setting up Open Collective at one point prior to having our non-profit but ended up just using our own non-profit instead of needing a fiscal host to handle it. We're on Benevity already because some people can only donate through that but we prefer Wise.

It implements the Android text-to-speech API for use as an Android text-to-speech backend.