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I predict that this will absolutely tank the sponsorship for projects that are not US-centric. But maybe that's the intention here???

In Germany, most people don't have a credit card because you don't need one in daily life.

Instant payments to friends? Giropay is free.

Buy stuff online? PayPal, Giropay, Klarna.

Send money to other EU countries? Every bank account supports SEPA, which is free.

With that in mind, nobody is willing to pay $50 annually for a card which then charges 3% of every transaction, because there are good and free alternatives. And I don't think anyone will create a CC just for GitHub. Let's hope Microsoft will think this through and offer sane alternative payment methods (like SEPA deduction, the default for recurring payments in Europe) before removing the only non-CC option.

> In Germany, most people don't have a credit card because you don't need one in daily life.

Highly inaccurate.

We don't have typical Credit Cards, but Debit Card acting as Credit Card for online transactions are the norm.

VPAY cards like Postbank or Deutsche Bank (the biggest commercial bank) don't work with GitHub.
Still much less common to have that vs. a Paypal account :(
Like other people have said, in Europe most banks give you a MasterCard/Visa debit card with your bank account, which work in virtually every online transaction without issue and don't charge (the sender) any fee. I would even say that with services like SEPA payments and Bizum, banks have caught up with tech and made platforms like PayPal/Stripe/Square essentially obsolete.
While that is correct, last time I tried, GitHub would reject Debit Cards for recurring payments and only accept true Credit Cards.
SEPA is regional, while PayPal and Stripe are global. Until (if ever) it will become global, it's no alternative by any means.
Banks withhold fees for cards however, of the order of 2%
I have never owned a credit card, but have owned cards issued by five different countries, and I never had a problem where specifically credit card was required as a payment. Including Germany, where exists a number of neobanks that have free accounts which include a debit card.

Thinking about it, I haven't met anyone in my life that doesn't have a card (regardless whether it is debit or credit).

Are you talking about actual credit cards or just using the term to mean payment cards in general? Regular "debit" cards generally don't have memberships or payment fees and can be used online anywhere credit cards are accepted, because from the vendor's perspective, they're the same thing.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1096803/credit-card-and-... reports 38m credit cards, 121m debit cards. German population is 84m. So "most people don't have credit card" might be true but it's still a lot. I'd expect - without having data to back it up - the group using Github Sponsors (who know what Github is) have credit cards.
At least for me, PayPal is outgoing. Used to use it for almost 20 years. But when they started to randomly verify identity with SMS TAN code, I moved to ApplePay wherever possible, and am no longer willing to use PayPal.

Besides, at least in my area, banks are deploying debitcards finally, so there is actually no need for a classical credit card anymore either.

Good, everything that allows me to ditch PayPal is a step forward.

> In Germany, most people don't have a credit card because you don't need one in daily life.

Same in Poland. I vaguely remember not being able to pay for something online with Visa Debit or Mastercard Debit something like 15 years ago.

The cards were issued by Polish banks. From my understanding, the situation in Germany is similar regarding card payments - debit cards have the same payment functionality as a credit cards.

That might be a Germam specific thing, right over the border in Czechia cards are omni-present.

Plus you have e-banks like Revolut.

But those are debit cards, not credit cards.
Do you mean that people usually have bank accounts with only a debit card or do you write about people with no bank accounts?
People usualy have bank accounts with debit cards, but often using schemes like maestro or v-pay, which are great for in-person payments and have lower fees than VISA or MasterCard, but don't have a credit card number and can't be used in online purchases.

Traditionally banks charge about $20/year extra for an actual VISA/MasterCard debit or credit card, though this has started to change. And of course the speed of change varies wildly by country, in some debit/credit cards are already widespread, in others not so much.

The former. It's pretty well established to have just a debit card that for does almost everything a credit card can do. I think in most EU you can get a similar set-up.
Visa and Mastercard debit. Google it. Welcome to 2023
Yes, debit card is the norm. Germany quite early had the EC/Giro card system as a default feature for any bank account. (Nowadays Maestro owned by MasterCard) Which was cheap and quick. Back in the 90ties credit cards were rare and only used by people travelling to U.S. or other specific needs.

But I think credit cards are way more spread these days and many banks leave the old system.

I also have virtual debit card only and making all my online payments with it. My bank had a phase cca 5 years ago when they were offering credit cards to people, but they stopped completely as they weren't able to tell people why they should be using credit cards instead of debit cards - from end user perspective in EU, there is no difference between those two.
In EU, all people have a debit card. Only few have a credit card too.
No wonder, they probably got their account locked by PayPal for "fraud" on regular basis, while paying exorbitant fees for it. At least that's my experience with PayPal.
> A credit card is the most insecure [...] payment method.

On contrary, it is the most secure because of the chargeback.

Someone stole your credit card data and bought anything with your money? No problem, just fill in chargeback request and money are back. Bank will handle the rest (including the finding the place where it was stolen and stopping accepting credit card transactions from that place at all, so if you are running online shop, better really secure the transactions).

> On contrary, it is the most secure because of the chargeback.

So a leaky card is better because you have chargeback. Meanwhile, debit cards are more secure and also offer chargeback.. Meanwhile, my debit card can get stolen and nobody will be able to use it. If I lose my credit card, anyone can do anything.

> So a leaky card is better because you have chargeback.

Yup, I will still stick to my point.

Someone stole my card? Not super convenient, but I do not lose any single penny. All will be back on my bank account.

Someone stole my Paypal password (on the phishing site)? It is my problem, Paypal will not refund it to me.

I bought some travel trip but travel agency did not fulfilled its obligations?

With credit card and chargeback I have all money back (and travel agency has their deal with payment company ceased).

With Paypal this is my problem and Paypal is not going to refund me any single cent.

Since my first chargeback request I don't hesitate to pay with cards at all. (And chargeback processing was faster than anyone expected: bank always contacts the other side to see their point of view and because other side doesn't want to loose their deal and go banckrupt, they send me money back on very same day)

This is clearly a bad idea, because credit cards are not as ubiquitous everywhere as they are in the US. If they don't want to do their research properly to figure this out, then they should at least ask, e.g. by giving a proper, timely notice with some option to back out. A month is clearly not enough. It's not even enough time for people to look for other income streams as the current ones will inevitably be affected.

I really have trouble understanding decisions like this by companies that put so much focus on diversity and inclusion, but never really consider that other places outside of the US exist for many of their decisions. It frankly makes no sense to me to spearhead the effort to rename the master branch to main, but ignore that people outside the US can't sponsor projects without a credit card. The actual harm done by the latter is arguably larger and definitely more clearly measurable. It's very disappointing.

> This is clearly a bad idea, because credit cards

Debit cards are, though, and it doesn't make any difference for online payments.

Ideally GitHub should support more local options (e.g. SEPA transfers, UPI, etc.), but card payments are already a very good starting point.

It totally does. I am from Germany and I cannot use my bank card for online payment and most people I know can't do it either. Especially if they have bank accounts at banks you can go to in person. Some online-bank accounts provide cards that can be used with online payments, but it's far from the most popular option.
PayPal is notoriously bad for everyone - both consumers and merchants. Using another alternative would be awesome.
It’s the only widely supported payment scheme which allows consumers to properly manage automatic payments, i.e. authorization and revocation are not stuck in the 90’s.
Considering the fees paypal charges - no wonder. At our company we are also trying to ditch paypal, since it constitutes to the lion share of total fees we pay payment processing, though paypal overall share compared to other payment methods is in the bottom percentage. Congratulations to Github on this step!
Bad move for sustainability of open source software. Not every European has a credit card.
Great move by GitHub. PayPal is garbage and it is better that bad gateways like them need to be removed.

There are better alternatives that don’t seize your funds and lock your account in order to kill your business or income.

For example?
Isn't revolut more popular in EU?
They have about 25 million customers, which would be about 5% of the EU population. Meanwhile about 38% of Europeans own a credit card [1].

Revolut is growing rapidly, so I assume there are plenty of bubbles where revolut is more widespread than credit cards. But the near-universal scheme in the EU would be sepa direct debit. And while the lack of instant confirmation is a drawback for online purchases, that shouldn't matter for something like GitHub Sponsors.

1: https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/people_with_credit...

Most if not all Debit Cards work for online transactions.

This has been a non issue for many years now.

Put a donate button in the readme
Honestly I do not understand why none of these sponsorship programs take direct bank transfers. Those are free in Europe for all parties involved, so they would have exactly zero processing fees. More money for them (since they can take bigger slice) and more money for the projects (since there are less parties taking their share). I just find it baffling.
> zero processing fees

This isn't true for a business. For business accounts with many incoming transactions many banks charge a small amount. Way less than PayPal and such, but more than zero. With Deutsche Bank for instance 0.06€/transaction.

I would assume tax reasons. Receiving money out of the blue without invoice is asking for audit from your local tax bureau.
Good riddance. We need to pave the way for decentralized payment methods that aren’t greedy with currency conversion rates and fees
Decentralized like...payment cards, controlled by a global duopoly?? The closest thing to decentralized payments we have is SEPA payments via PSD2 "open banking" APIs, but that is significantly more difficult to implement and bank support is spotty due to TPPs having to negotiate access with each bank individually.
Like SEPA payment, but from my experience with US bank (BBVA) stuck in 1990s, it is still a big PITA to do something mundane like SEPA.
People mention credit cards as alternatives, but forget paypal's ease of use. It's a lot of work to enter a credit card for small , mostly one-time payments. Paypal makes that easy, at least for me i tend to purchase more because of it.