(UPDATE 2018.10.21 – My account has now been closed by Liberapay support.)
Hey, just to let you know, I’m going to close the Liberapay account… as soon as Liberapay lets me.
As anyone who was using Liberapay probably knows, sometime in July, their original payment processor, Mangopay, decided to stop accepting Liberapay. Liberapay made a blog post about it, suggesting that everyone gets out their money while they can, and they’re going to find alternatives in the future.
So I got all of my remaining money out, and soon after I decided to change my bank accounts to a bank I’ve wanted to change for quite a while now because I figured I would no longer need SEPA transfers (something this new bank doesn’t accept right now), because that’s how you withdrew money from Liberapay’s original payment processor.
While Liberapay have found alternatives, everything has been very poorly communicated, and I assumed that any Mangopay donations would have been halted… but they inexplicably haven’t. While it’s not much, I’ve still been receiving donations into my account via this method. This is money I can’t withdraw anymore. I can’t stop the flow of money, and I have no idea if I can receive money anymore via Liberapay by other methods. Their blogs and social channels has been silent since early August and the UI doesn’t really communicate anything that makes much sense. All of this doesn’t make me feel secure using this service anymore.
I left things going for a while after the Mangopay incident because I assumed Liberapay would take care of things, but they haven’t and the communication has been really bad, which is bad news for both me and you, which is the main reason I’m closing the account.
I respect their open source and non-profit ethos, but this really isn’t good because this is people’s money, and you’ve got to be able to trust that the money is going to where people expect it to go. I hope that they can get these kinds of problems worked out in the future, but I’m personally too spooked to want to continue with them.
I can’t close the account immediately because in order to do so, I’d need a bank account that’s in my name for the remaining money in my account to be withdrawn, so I’ve contacted their support as instructed. Hopefully my account will be closed ASAP.
Because I can’t stop the flow of money, all I can do is recommend that all of my current Liberapay donors stop donating to my account immediately.
Luckily it’s not a lot of money that’s remaining in the account (€5), but it’s still money that you donated, and I’m really sorry that this has happened.
I’d like to thank everyone who has donated via Liberapay, both in the past and recently. If you’d like to donate with another method, you can via Patreon or PayPal.
If you don’t like either option, you can stay tuned because I will eventually move from Patreon to Drip (which is run by a Public Benefit Corporation and has a well-defined anti-hate policy)… whenever it becomes available (the wait for Drip to be available to the public has been a lot longer than expected).