We welcome your donations, but please don't charge them back!
Over the past several years as we have been developing this platform and growing this awesome community we came across many very nice and generous folks that would selflessly donate a few bucks to our cause. We have always strictly used these donations to help pay for the hosting which at this point is getting a bit on the costly side due to those server upgrades back in August of last year.
The other day I received an email from Paypal letting me know that a donation made back in November has been "charged back" by the credit card holder. Thinking, oh well, I guess they need their money back I accepted the charge back and even left a message letting the person know that they could have simply emailed me and told me they needed the donation back and I would have gladly sent it back to them. Really, I totally understand that someone may have needed those funds back, and would have no issue to click the "refund" button.
The one thing that really hurt however is that the chargeback fee after all the conversion and paypal mumbo jumbo was over 30 cdn (more than the donation), which put our poor little donation account into the negative which set off a chain reaction that had paypal lock our account. Last night I had to spend over 2 hours on the phone with them explaining what happened and that the original payment was just a donation and that no transfer of ownership changed hands of any product. They told me that because I "accepted liability" I was liable for the chargeback fee, and they wouldn't do anything about it. Ok, lesson learned I guess, who would have thought.
Either way, please, if you're feeling generous and wish to help out, we highly encourage it, we don't run any ads, and we don't have sponsored content so the only way we get help is by receiving donations from generous people such as yourselves. But please, I just ask that if for whatever reason you feel like you need that donation back, please PM me or email support@snapzu.com with your email address, and let us know you need the donation back! We really appreciate it, just one charge back can negate 3 donations that even at this point come far in-between.
Sorry for the rant, just felt really sad about it since I just couldn't understand why someone would do that. Thanks for reading/understanding.
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Ok and what is the address to donate /u/drunkinninja
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As Gladsdotter pointed out, we just have the one donate button at the bottom of the page.
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How much is your hosting costing you? I just sent you a few bucks to help out.
Thanks for helping out, we definitely appreciate it. As for the hosting costs... it's in the $670 CDN per month range, changing slightly based on a number of small factors. It used to be much cheaper, but at this point if we down sized the servers we would come to a crawl and it would be hard to load anything.
You deserve it sir, and I hope that got you out of the red. I did notice you're hosted on OVH -- have you tried flexible cloud hosting? Wouldn't that be cheaper and based on daily traffic?
We did try a couple of cloud hosting solutions in the past, but both came out to be more expensive with their rates. Dedicated hosting still appears to be the best solution when it comes to affordable prices.
Is there another way we can send payments? gofundme.com or something similar?
At this point we just have paypal and I think we created a bitcoin wallet as well. We don't have any other available methods.
Who gets the chargeback fee? the cardholder or paypal?