For those of you that haven’t heard blender is now setup to take monthly donations! This is great news as it will mean a (hopefully) more predictable and consistent income - so we as the community can get more blender awesomeness!
More info
Where you can setup your donation:
Finally! Considering the donation sizes, there really is no reason not to subscribe, and it’s very convenient this way. But, what the hell is a euro? Like $100? 
For those North Americans curious about the exchange rate:
10 Euro is around $14 US / CAD
This is a good step.
Blender has a great community, and it shows. The compositing fund raiser raised over $8,000, which is no small sum of money. It’s also, I think, a good testament to the reality of what Blender and the community is about, it’s simply not a ‘…Just because it’s free’ type of attitude.
I shall be setting up a monthly donation.
Very well said - I already setup my monthly donation… can’t wait to see what the community can pull together on this…
Anyone know the significants of the bronze, silver, etc? Just curious if it means anything besides a badge of honor.
I did not know about this until now. Great thread!
Just wondering the same thing myself. Platinum looks a bit much for my wallet but 25 euro won’t kill the bank. I hope:eek::o
Don’t think you’ll get anything special for donating. It would have been great if the donors got some acknowledgement, like for example a badge under their avatar here at BA like cgtalk have for paying members or gallery awards. But I guess that might be difficult to achieve since BA and the Blender foundation is to separate organizations…
I’ll subscribe soon 
I guess you probably get listed somewhere on the blender.org site. Guess we’ll find out when more is announced or if someone chimes in here. Either way it’s great they are finally doing this.
Here is the Ton’s recent twitter message:
Developer Fund update: 40 subscribers already (thanks!). Admins agreed on first completing @atmind and @lukastoenne fundraisers.
That’s fantastic! Nice to see that Jeroen Bakker (compositing) and Lukas Toenne (Particle nodes) will be the first to be supported by the fund.
Still, 40 subscribers is not enough to is not keep even one project at running full time. But its a great start!
40 subscribers is pretty impressive I think. If the average donation is 15€ (A modest guess), 40 x 15 = 600€. 600 x 12 = 7200€/10,190$ per year, which although isn’t much, is certainly a good start. If we take a high guess and say that the average donation is 25€, that’s 12,000€/16,984$. And the subscription was started what, this week? I’m impressed.
Hmmmm … 40 ???
Not that impressive I think.
I would have thought people would jump on this occasion!
I immediately subscribed because that’s the honorable thing to do : you have this great program with this awesome community and with a small monthly donation from a large userbase Blender could become the greatest in no time.
As to the “bronze” and “silver” etc. , I do’nt know but I did get an email from Ton thanking me for subscribing and that is more than enough for me : you are welcome Ton and I can only hope all other Blender users will feel the same very soon!
And I hope this thread will stay alive so that the Fund keeps getting attention : only if people know about it is there a chance that they will subscribe …
Dominiek.
I felt exactly the same. I get so much enjoyment out of blender I felt ‘obligated’ to help out the foundation - they are giving me something for nothing - which really doesn’t happen that much anymore…
Hopefully the number of subscribers will continue to grow - I’m sure the foundation will put the funds to very good use (as they have shown repeatedly in the past.)
Five points comes to mind:
Edit: Another point that needs to be made is that if this results in substantial advancements for Blender, more people will join in. Knowing that it is governed by the foundation itself is a huge plus. One thing I think would help is knowing what projects are applicable for donation for the time being, and what you might help to accomplish with your donation, instead of just donating blindly and hoping for the best (this really isn´t very transparent). Furthermore, a monthly report on where donations have gone, and possible results would aid as well. Bueno, those are my 2+1 cents 
Great initiative, of course!
I’ve donated to many projects, farstahary twice, twice to bmesh, the two node, opencl and rewrite.
I’m gonna wait until these projects finnish then sign up bf fundraiser.
then Ton and folks have to make sure my money ends up hiring talents and goes to support right projects ^^ but I’ve faith in them.
also the “blender network” for hiring folks, etc. I think could end up using like something like this. imagine hiring a 3d artists, and all he needs is hardware “software” is free.
donating a small sum every month as he is hired as an option to give back and make sure his or hers tools are getting better all the time would be a really selling point.
also such a eco system would ensure small studios to have the same tools and oppurtunity as big companies. and big companies could in a way “pay” for small companies to exist and also individuals to use the software.
it’s a really neat idea.