Why we don’t accept donations

A popular question we have received over the last few years is how users can donate money to us. While we have wanted to support this for a long time, a few reasons prevented us from accepting donations. So let’s take a look at them. 

One of the biggest reasons is that in QueUp’s current form, it is challenging to implement any feature or cosmetic that we could give in exchange for supporting us. Not being able to provide something in return for a donation doesn’t incentivize someone to donate in the first place. 

For a long time, simply taking your money but not being able to provide anything in return never really sat right with us.  

Being a side project for both Larry and I, we don’t have the time to make and meet guarantees. In the past, we’ve experienced downtime, which has lasted for days and sometimes weeks. In these cases, only our money was effectively ‘wasted.’ However, if we accept donations, there is additional pressure on us, knowing that users have given us money, but they aren’t getting anything in return. 

And finally, accepting donations introduces administrative complications. More specifically: tax. To receive money, we need to use a payment processor; however, a formal tax entity (separate from an individual’s tax entity) must exist to use their service. While this isn’t too challenging to set up and maintain, it does come at a high up-front cost and has yearly re-occurring fees. 

 Will we ever accept donations?

We have thought much about why we haven’t accepted donations; ultimately, it comes down to our current mindset. For example, we need to acknowledge that we can only offer QueUp as it is for the time being due to our limited resources. 

What next?

This blog post is post one of two posts. In our next blog post, we have an exciting announcement to share with you, so make sure to keep an eye out for that!