GitHub Sponsors will stop accepting PayPal on February 23, 2023

I predict that this will absolutely tank the sponsorship for projects that are not US-centric. But maybe that&#x27;s the intention here???<p>In Germany, most people don&#x27;t have a credit card because you don&#x27;t need one in daily life.<p>Instant payments to friends? Giropay is free.<p>Buy stuff online? PayPal, Giropay, Klarna.<p>Send money to other EU countries? Every bank account supports SEPA, which is free.<p>With that in mind, nobody is willing to pay $50 annually for a card which then charges 3% of every transaction, because there are good and free alternatives. And I don&#x27;t think anyone will create a CC just for GitHub. Let&#x27;s hope Microsoft will think this through and offer sane alternative payment methods (like SEPA deduction, the default for recurring payments in Europe) before removing the only non-CC option.

No wonder, they probably got their account locked by PayPal for &quot;fraud&quot; on regular basis, while paying exorbitant fees for it. At least that&#x27;s my experience with PayPal.

&gt; A credit card is the most insecure [...] payment method.<p>On contrary, it is the most secure because of the chargeback.<p>Someone stole your credit card data and bought anything with your money? No problem, just fill in chargeback request and money are back. Bank will handle the rest (including the finding the place where it was stolen and stopping accepting credit card transactions from that place at all, so if you are running online shop, better really secure the transactions).

This is clearly a bad idea, because credit cards are not as ubiquitous everywhere as they are in the US. If they don&#x27;t want to do their research properly to figure this out, then they should at least ask, e.g. by giving a proper, <i>timely</i> notice with some option to back out. A month is clearly not enough. It&#x27;s not even enough time for people to look for other income streams as the current ones will inevitably be affected.<p>I really have trouble understanding decisions like this by companies that put so much focus on diversity and inclusion, but never really consider that other places outside of the US exist for many of their decisions. It frankly makes no sense to me to spearhead the effort to rename the master branch to main, but ignore that people outside the US can&#x27;t sponsor projects without a credit card. The actual harm done by the latter is arguably larger and definitely more clearly measurable. It&#x27;s very disappointing.

PayPal is notoriously bad for everyone - both consumers and merchants. Using another alternative would be awesome.

Considering the fees paypal charges - no wonder. At our company we are also trying to ditch paypal, since it constitutes to the lion share of total fees we pay payment processing, though paypal overall share compared to other payment methods is in the bottom percentage. Congratulations to Github on this step!

Bad move for sustainability of open source software. Not every European has a credit card.

Honestly I do not understand why <i>none</i> of these sponsorship programs take direct bank transfers. Those are free in Europe for all parties involved, so they would have exactly <i>zero</i> processing fees. More money for them (since they can take bigger slice) and more money for the projects (since there are less parties taking their share). I just find it baffling.

Good riddance. We need to pave the way for decentralized payment methods that aren’t greedy with currency conversion rates and fees

People mention credit cards as alternatives, but forget paypal&#x27;s ease of use. It&#x27;s a lot of work to enter a credit card for small , mostly one-time payments. Paypal makes that easy, at least for me i tend to purchase more because of it.