# Donate

You can donate to Shields.io via [OpenCollective](https://opencollective.com/shields).

## How the money is spent

Shields.io is a non-profit project run by unpaid volunteers. We use your donations to pay for our hosting costs.

Shields badges are everywhere. Shields badges appear on GitHub, NPM, PyPI, Ruby Gems, Rust Crates... If people build software there, shields badges are on it. Our userbase scales with the size of the software development community as a whole. This means we serve a lot of traffic. While the majority of image impressions are served from downstream proxies, we serve over 1.6 billion requests per month from our own infrastructure and transfer over 3Tb of outbound bandwidth each month.

Those are big numbers, and servers cost money. So does bandwidth. We cover our hosting costs with donations from the community.

## Donation tiers

While we accept donations of any size, we do have some suggested tiers.

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          <h3>Sponsor</h3>
          <p>Recommended for **companies**: With a monthly donation of $35, you can help to sustain our activities. Your company logo and a link to your website will feature at the top of our [community page](https://shields.io/community).</p>
          <p class="align-bottom"><a href="https://opencollective.com/shields/contribute/sponsor-2412/checkout" class="button button--primary button--medium">Become a Sponsor</a></p>
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      <div className="col col--6">
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          <h3>Monthly Backer</h3>
          <p>Recommended for **individuals**: With a monthly donation of $3, you can help to sustain our activities on an ongoing basis.</p>
          <p class="align-bottom"><a href="https://opencollective.com/shields/contribute/monthly-backer-2988/checkout" class="button button--primary button--medium">Become a Monthly Backer</a></p>
        </div>
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          <h3>Backer</h3>
          <p>If you would prefer not to commit to a monthly donation, but you think shields.io has provided some value [over the last 10+ years](https://github.com/badges/shields/discussions/8867), consider making a one-time donation of $10.</p>
          <p class="align-bottom"><a href="https://opencollective.com/shields/contribute/backer-2411/checkout" class="button button--secondary button--medium">Become a Backer</a></p>
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      <div className="col col--6">
        <div className="padding-horiz--md padding-vert--lg flex-column-container">
          <h3>Something Else</h3>
          <p>Make a custom one-time or recurring donation of any amount.</p>
          <p class="align-bottom"><a href="https://opencollective.com/shields/donate" class="button button--secondary button--medium">Make a custom Donation</a></p>
        </div>
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## FAQ

### Can I donate using another platform?

Currently we only accept donations via [OpenCollective](https://opencollective.com/shields). OpenCollective should be convenient for most users as it allows you to donate using credit card, bank transfer, or PayPal and is available in most countries.

### I donated as a sponsor. How do I change my company logo or URL?

We pull the logo and URL from your Open Collective profile. You can update these at any time from within Open Collective and those changes will be reflected on the community page within 24 hours.

### Can I see exactly how the money is being used?

Using OpenCollective means our finances are completely transparent. All transactions are publicly visible on https://opencollective.com/shields
