I budget my donations so I make an effort to see who I think need it the most. For example, I use Tor daily, but they have huge institutional funding. My to-do list app doesn’t.

There are also some worthy candidates who simply reject donations, like Handbrake.

A few I haven’t seen mentioned:

• Small websites anyone can use for FOSS services, like (e.g. Private.coffee, Disroot, Nadeko, Riseup)
• Any of the 5 remaining Invidious instances, Google has put effort into killing off other instances. Same with other social media alternative frontends.
• Someone mentioned F-Droid, I don’t know what I’d do without the Google Store alternatives like Aurora.
• yt-dlp devs
• Lemmy and various instances
• Your operating systems, incl phones and servers if relevant
• Codeberg
• A few FOSS softwares used for non-fediverse sites I use. Look at all the sites you use and think about which ones are probably underfunded. Don’t be afraid to ask if they haven’t said anything.

GrapheneOS because we need a consumer privacy focused alternative to Google and Apple.

I support Thunderbird and Lemmy.

I support Thunderbird because it’s a great email client and I use it daily. I feel like I owe them at least a few euros a month.

I support the development of Lemmy because it’s a social media platform without a large company controlling it’s content, and keeping that afloat with a small monthly payment is worth it to me.

I’ve always donated to Signal, Bitwarden, and KDE. Lemmy got added to the list this year, plus I always try to support a quality project that’s between a rock and a hard place. I gave to the Oregon State University open source lab this year when I heard about their struggles. They’re why Mozilla is a thing along with many other foundational components of the open internet.

I have no money atm but my last round of FOSS donations was just picking based on a function of how much I use a piece of software; how much I like it; and how much money I think it already gets. e.g. I didn’t donate to the Linux kernel because that’s already well-funded, even though I use it every day and like it well enough.

I think my last donations included River (the Wayland compositor I use). For the life of me I can’t remember what else there was but I tend to do rounds of donations when I have money to spare and just pick software based on the above criteria.

I find it important to support projects that contribute to the greater free software ecosystem. I pick projects I benefit from and whose continued existence I am invested in, despite any faults.

• The NetBSD Project
• The Free Software Foundation (FSF)
• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)
• The SDF plan9front server
• Project Gutenberg
• Standard Ebooks
• The Internet Archive (IA)
• The Wikimedia Foundation

When I work with Ardour professionally, I always make a donation on a per-project basis, depending on budget of said project.

It is truly Pro Grade software, it deserves it.

And if the budget is small, I do i small donation, easy :)

The NetBSD Foundation

It’s not very frequent, but I usually give money to Jami and to Lemmy.

Immich, it makes digital sovereignty possible thanks to it appealing UI (and it’s quite solid otherwise too).

i do KDE and Graphene, i usually sponsor bug hunts. might buy some system76 stuff if cosmic keeps getting better

Just signal for now

KDE

I haven’t financially supported project or developers, but I have supported fediverse streamers financially. That way they can support their infrastructure. I try to bug hunt it suggest improvement for foss projects since it helps improve and let maintainers and developers improve their projects

Lemmy and Accrescent.