How to get recurring donations?

[adrelanos]

I'd like to offer a method to subscribe for recurring donations. A user should be able to sign up voluntarily to donate X BTC every month.

They should be able to any, one or multiple of those: bank wire, flattr, webmoney, dwolla, pecunix, paypal, weepay, etc...

The services charges the monthly donation, takes a small fee and directs the rest to my btc wallet.

Are there any services for that?

[Stephen Gornick]

I'd like to offer a method to subscribe for recurring donations.

Propster does this.  Essentially, the contributor maintains a balance of bitcoins in that person's Propster EWallet and periodically the pledges are processed and the funds transfer.

So you simply set yourself up with a Jar on Propster and direct your "fans" there.
 - https://propster.me

[Stephen Gornick]

They should be able to any, one or multiple of those: bank wire, flattr, webmoney, dwolla, pecunix, paypal, weepay, etc...

For the same reason that no Bitcoin exchanges accept paypal, wepay, etc, you likely won't find any offer to send non-reversible bitcoins using funds received through these payment methods notorious for chargebacks.

Perhaps the Dwolla method could be implemented.

The payment service simply sends once a month to your contributors a Dwolla invoice.  Dwolla is a push-only payment network thus the contributor would need to login and hit the Pay button each month but at least those funds, once they've been sent, are easily converted to bitcoins (while having a relatively low likelihood of being charged back.)

[bittenbob]

We have a subscription payment option that could be used for recurring donations but it is only for Bitcoin

https://walletbit.com/docs/subscriptions

BONUS REDEEM CODE: REPAY-BTC-3B0D4-F0A54-43AEE-3E145

[Armando]

We have a subscription payment option that could be used for recurring donations but it is only for Bitcoin

https://walletbit.com/docs/subscriptions

Is this service limited to walletbit users only? I.e. if my customer is using official client, can I somehow create monthly invoice for him, using your merchant services?

[Stephen Gornick]

Is this service limited to walletbit users only? I.e. if my customer is using official client, can I somehow create monthly invoice for him, using your merchant services?

Bitcoin is a push technology.  There is no current way for any third party service to spend from your funds in your Bitcoin.org client.  (except if you were to perhaps share your private keys with that service .. which is a bad, bad idea.)

At some point I suppose there could be M of N transactions created in advance, and simply if the funds haven't already been spent the third party could process the spend when the subscription renewal time comes.

Bitcoin is like cash.  So are there any subscription models that use cash?   Not any that I can think of, except maybe a monthly collection at the office for the birthday gift pool or something like that.

I know the subscription commerce model for startups is all the rage now (e.g., Dollar Shave Club, Birchbox) but if you look into that, actually getting paid is a huge problem for them:
 - http://blog.chargebee.com/10-common-recurring-billing-challenges-learn-how-to-overcome-them/#sthash.RZadJwfx.dpbs

The challenge for any intermediary accepting fiat and paying bitcoins comes back down to this:

For the same reason that no Bitcoin exchanges accept paypal, wepay, etc, you likely won't find any offer to send non-reversible bitcoins using funds received through these payment methods notorious for chargebacks.

[markm]

Look up "cron".

In essence you can set up any program/script to be run automatically.

So anyone who wants to send you a bitcoin every month for example can tell "cron" to run "bitcoind sendtoaddress 1youraddess356tey4h4h 1" every month for example.

People who use a fancy-GUI operating system probably already have a fancy-GUI to do this so presumably it is already in place on your customer's machines and for those customers who demand a GUI that too is probably already right there just waiting for them to actually decide they do in fact want something (such as a donation) to happen automatically at set times or spans of time...

Admittedly having something in GUI clients to help wizard people through using their automatic-actions system to set up e.g. a donation might be something they would like too.

-MarkM-

[Meni Rosenfeld]

They should be able to any, one or multiple of those: bank wire, flattr, webmoney, dwolla, pecunix, paypal, weepay, etc...

For the same reason that no exchanges accept paypal, wepay, etc, you likely won't find any offer to send non-reversible bitcoins using funds received through these payment methods notorious for chargebacks.

If it's for donations I don't think there's a problem. Of course there will need to be some assurance that the payments are indeed charitable.