CoMaps, cobalt, Forgejo, F-Droid: four accounts above $1,000 a month on Liberapay, out of 1,773 that take money there
Four open-source accounts that take in more than $1,000 a month on Liberapay — a maps app, a two-person browser team, a software forge and one F-Droid maintainer — and what each ledger shows about who pays and what the money buys.
Liberapay takes no cut of the donations it moves and publishes what every account receives, week by week. 1 In its last payday it moved $26,030.80 between 16,651 users, and 1,773 of them received money. 2 The platform's own ranking of recipients by income puts twenty accounts above the equivalent of $1,000 a month: the eighteen on its first page and the first two on its second. 3
Four of the twenty are here: a maps app, a two-person browser team, a software forge, and the platform's largest individual recipient. Their crossings run from September 2026 back to July 2022.
Every figure was read on 15 October 2026. Money figures are weekly receipts from each account's own chart, converted at that day's rate and multiplied by 4.33 to a month. 1 A donation goes straight to the recipient's Stripe or PayPal account; there is no fiscal host. 1
1. CoMaps: a fork that reached the line two weeks ago
What it is: CoMaps is a free offline maps app for Android and iOS, a community-led fork of Organic Maps announced on 12 May 2025. 45 Its code sits on Codeberg, where the repository has 2,166 stars, and is mirrored on GitHub at 585. 67
Public money figure: The profile states €208.28 a week from 299 patrons; the receipts for the week to 14 October are €210.43 from 304 patrons, about $1,019 a month. 89
Weekly receipts: €178 a week last March, €197.93 in the week to 23 September, then €206.56, €210.75 and €210.43 in the three weeks since. Those three are the first in which this account has held the equivalent of $1,000 a month. 9
Who pays: 304 patrons giving €1 to €5 a week, the largest at €5.19. The profile tells donors that Open Collective is the preferred platform and that Liberapay money passes through a personal account into it. 8 On that collective's page the largest individual contributor is listed at £13,113, annotated "most of this $ is from LiberaPay". 1011
The model: Recurrent donations with no product behind them and no corporate tier. 10
The trigger: None single. The patron count has climbed from 212 in the week of 4 March 2026 to 304 on 14 October, and the crossing is the end of that line. 9
What the money buys: Server capacity. Across both platforms the collective reports £25,890.33 raised, £3,637.70 disbursed and £22,252.63 in the bank, against an estimated annual budget of £23,948. 10 Its November 2025 update says a faster map-generation server was paid for by financial supporters. 12
If you maintain a project like CoMaps, would this work for you?
It works if a few hundred people use your app every week and will give the price of a coffee. Seventeen months brought CoMaps 304 patrons of €1 to €5 a week.
It has bought no one's time: the collective has spent £3,637.70 of the £25,890.33 raised, and holds more than a year of budget.
2. imput: two patrons at the ceiling
What it is: imput is the two-person team behind cobalt, a media downloader with 45,003 stars, and Helium, a privacy-focused Chromium browser with 21,607. 13141516
Public money figure: The profile states $263.12 a week from 80 patrons; the receipts for the week to 14 October are higher, $378.84 from 87 patrons, about $1,640 a month. 1718
Weekly receipts: $135.47 in the week to 22 April 2026, then $248.77 in the week to 29 April — from about $587 to about $1,077 a month in seven days. The account has stayed above the line since. 18
Who pays: Two patrons give $100.00 a week each, the platform's maximum from one donor to one recipient, and a third gives $38.46; the rest of the public list runs from $23.07 to $2.31. 117
The model: Recurrent donations from users, with the ask priced on the project's own site. Helium's sponsor page offers a one-time tip through Stripe and a recurring one "Processed via Liberapay", and says the browser is "maintained by two people" and "funded directly by its users". 19 The downloader's repository credits a hosting company with part of its infrastructure. 13
The trigger: One week, three more patrons, and the money doubled — the shape of a patron arriving at the $100 ceiling. The downloader's repository took its last push on 6 April 2026; the browser is the active project now. 1318
What the money buys: The team's work and the services behind it. There is no expense ledger to read, because the donation is the payment. 19
If you maintain a project like imput, would this work for you?
It works at a patron count most maintainers would call a rounding error: 87 accounts carry $1,640 a month, two at the maximum and the other 85 averaging $2.10 a week.
It also takes two people to end it. Without the two ceiling patrons the account falls to about $775 a month, which is the part a crowd actually supplied.
3. Forgejo: a pool that pays four maintainers
What it is: Forgejo is the self-hosted software forge that Codeberg runs and gives away, with 5,646 stars. It is built under Codeberg e.V., a German non-profit; its v15.0.0 release of 16 April 2026 is supported until July 2027. 202122
Public money figure: The profile states €455.24 a week from 244 patrons, against a goal of €500; the receipts for the week to 14 October are €490.17 from 253 patrons, about $2,373 a month. 2324
Weekly receipts: €192.30 in the week to 17 December 2025 and €241.35 in the week to 24 December, a step from about $931 to about $1,168 a month. A second came in May 2026: €281.38, then €368.64 and €412.15. 24
Who pays: 253 patrons, 84 of them public, the largest at DKK173.07 a week, about $26, then €20.00 and €9.61. The account is a pool whose page says donations are "directly distributed across team members" the community accepted; it lists four member accounts — codeberg, crystalc, meissa and viceice. 23
The model: A group account on a donation platform, with the project's own decision process choosing who is paid, and a published goal set in weekly income. 23
The trigger: Payer-led again: the December crossing came in a week when patrons went from 139 to 142, and the May step added 22 in a fortnight. The project's monthly report for that period covers the v15 release and a security dispute, and describes no funding drive. 2224
What the money buys: Contributor time, split four ways. An even division of €490.17 a week is €123 each, some $594 a month before payment fees. 23
If you maintain a project like Forgejo, would this work for you?
It works if several people already do maintainer work and your governance can agree on who gets paid. This is the only one of the four that turns donations into payments to more than one person.
It stays a top-up. $2,373 a month across four accounts is no one's wage, and the project still sets its own ask at €500 a week.
4. licaon-kter: the ceiling, reached in 2022
What it is: F-Droid is the Android app repository that builds everything it ships from source, and licaon-kter is its "Maintainer-in-Residence", triaging issues and merge requests, testing builds and moderating the forum. The client's repository has 2,688 stars on GitLab. 252627
Public money figure: The profile states RON 2,802.95 a week from 1,008 patrons; the receipts for the week to 14 October are RON 2,946.27 from 1,015 patrons, about $2,675 a month. 2528
Weekly receipts: Flat. Almost every week since July 2026 has landed between $2,638 and $2,748 a month, and the account has published a weekly income chart since December 2020. It first passed the equivalent of $1,000 a month on 13 July 2022. 28
Who pays: 1,015 patrons, the largest crowd of the four and the fourth-largest total on the platform, behind Codeberg, Infosec.exchange and Liberapay itself. This is an individual's account, so the money is his. 325
The model: A salary assembled from small donors. In April 2022 F-Droid asked for €1,200 a week so that he could keep contributing full time; his own account now takes about €618 a week. 29
The trigger: None in the past year, which is why the case is here: above $1,000 a month since 2022, and no growth since.
What the money buys: His time, paid to him directly rather than into a project fund.
If you maintain a project like licaon-kter, would this work for you?
It works when the work is visible, endless and unglamorous, and attached to software thousands of people use daily. A thousand patrons is the largest crowd on this platform, and it took years of steady publishing to hold.
It stops short of the project's own number. F-Droid wanted €1,200 a week and the crowd paid about €618, and the line has been flat for over a year.
What these four numbers are
| Account | Public figure, 15 October 2026 | Evidence class | Who pays | What the money buys |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CoMaps | €208.28 a week from 299 patrons; €210.43 received in the week to 14 October 89 | Weekly receipts since May 2025; first week above $1,000 a month was 30 September 2026 | 304 patrons at €1–€5 a week; money forwarded to the project's Open Collective | Servers; £22,252.63 held against a £23,948 annual budget |
| imput | $263.12 a week from 80 patrons; $378.84 received in the week to 14 October 1718 | Weekly receipts since July 2024; first week above $1,000 a month was 29 April 2026 | 87 patrons, two at the platform's $100-a-week maximum | The team's work and the services behind it |
| Forgejo | €455.24 a week from 244 patrons, goal €500; €490.17 received in the week to 14 October 2324 | Weekly receipts since July 2024; first week above $1,000 a month was 24 December 2025 | 253 patrons, 84 public; the largest gives about $26 a week | Contributor time shared four ways |
| licaon-kter | RON 2,802.95 a week from 1,008 patrons; RON 2,946.27 received in the week to 14 October 2528 | Weekly receipts since December 2020; first week above $1,000 a month was 13 July 2022 | 1,015 patrons, the largest crowd of the four | His time as F-Droid's Maintainer-in-Residence |
Each weekly figure is what the account received in that one week. The profile's headline is the total of the donations pledged at the moment it is read, and the two differ slightly on all four accounts.
Model-fit matrix
| Project archetype | What these four ledgers show working | What to prove before you copy it |
|---|---|---|
| Consumer app you give away, on phones or desktops | Recurrent donations from the people running it, at €1 to €5 a week each; CoMaps needed 304 of them, imput 87 | That hundreds of your users will give the price of a coffee; CoMaps took seventeen months to find them |
| Web tool or utility with an anonymous audience | Donations as the only revenue, with nothing to buy; two patrons at the platform cap supply 76% of imput's headline | That a handful of large donors cannot walk away and halve the account; one donor is capped at $100 a week |
| Self-hosted server or infrastructure software | A pooled account paying named maintainers, against a published weekly income goal; Forgejo's second step added 22 patrons in a fortnight | That your project has a process able to split money, and that the result is a top-up rather than a wage |
| Maintainer work inside a bigger ecosystem | One person's account for one person's maintenance work; licaon-kter's crowd is the largest on the platform | That your work is visible, endless and attached to software enough people use daily to notice it |
| Library, framework or CLI tool | These four cases are an app, a browser, a forge and one person's maintenance work | Whether a crowd funds a dependency at all, or the payer has to be a company that can be invoiced |
All four take money the same way, as recurrent donations; what separates them is the size of the crowd — 1,015 patrons for licaon-kter, 304 for CoMaps, 253 for Forgejo, 87 for imput. Size the ask to the people already running your software every day.
References
- 1Liberapay FAQ
liberapay.com
- 2Liberapay stats
liberapay.com
- 3Liberapay recipients
liberapay.com
- 4CoMaps
comaps.app
- 5
- 6comaps/comaps on Codeberg
codeberg.org
- 7comaps/comaps mirror on GitHub
github.com
- 8CoMaps on Liberapay
liberapay.com
- 9CoMaps weekly receipts
liberapay.com
- 10CoMaps on Open Collective
opencollective.com
- 11Liberapay ledger, CoMaps Open Collective
opencollective.com
- 12Faster maps generation server thanks to you
opencollective.com
- 13imputnet/cobalt
github.com
- 14imputnet/helium
github.com
- 15cobalt.tools
cobalt.tools
- 16Helium Browser
helium.computer
- 17imput on Liberapay
liberapay.com
- 18imput weekly receipts
liberapay.com
- 19Sponsor Helium
helium.computer
- 20forgejo/forgejo on Codeberg
codeberg.org
- 21Forgejo
forgejo.org
- 22Forgejo monthly report, May 2026
forgejo.org
- 23forgejo on Liberapay
liberapay.com
- 24forgejo weekly receipts
liberapay.com
- 25licaon-kter on Liberapay
liberapay.com
- 26F-Droid
f-droid.org
- 27fdroid/fdroidclient on GitLab
gitlab.com
- 28licaon-kter weekly receipts
liberapay.com
- 29
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