My Kofi donations will be relatively skewed since I started with GitHub sponsors for a time before, which is where most of my donations come from.

GitHub sponsors can make things quite frictionless compared to something like KoFi, but whether that helps may significantly depend on the audience for your software, since it’s less likely to be a benefit for non-technical/develop audience who don’t already have a GitHub account set up for business.

Ultimately, donations/sponsors are a hard grift, and what really matters is having an audience, and luck. I built up an audience for quite a few years before going down any kind of monetization route, but that meant I had an ecosystem to play into by that time. I have several routes of community engagement (Reddit, YouTube, PeerTube, Project Blog + Email updates, Discord) which help build, retain and personally connect with an audience, which I believe does help in this area.

Overall my donations (across KoFi and GitHub sponsors) has continued to grow, but more steadily after hitting an initial potential cap within my audience.

If interested, I have written a bit more about how I’ve acquired many of my sponsors here, and I recently created a visual breakdown of my 2024 donation/sponsor sizes here.

I run my project from donations, sponsorships and paid support services. Am now more than covering my living costs, and forwarding a fair bit on to other open source projects (mainly project dependencies). I have a recent breakdown of finances here.

Just to contrast with some of the other comments regarding this, i’ve have a pretty good experience with this. Was fairly simple to setup up some docker-based runnings following their admin guidance. Have set up a couple (One for Codeberg, one for my own Forgejo instance) each via a seperate LXC container on my home lab. Has been relatively simple to administer so far.

The actions format may take some getting used to if not familiar with GitHub’s own actions CI, which if closely emulates, but most of my projects were coming from GitHub anyway.

Just be aware that, while it’s marketed as open source, from my last look into the project the open part relied on non-open licensing/code. More details in my blogpost here. Might not matter to some, but might matter if being open source is an important factor.