Small Money, Big Stripe Confusion

I got my first GitHub Sponsors payment yesterday. Five US dollars, landed at around 21:00. I didn't see the notification until I was heading to bed, so at 02:15, right as I was about to fall asleep, I opened the email and immediately posted this:

View post on Bluesky

Not exactly composed. But it's the honest version, and honesty seems fitting for a post about five dollars.

For anyone who doesn't recognise the name, Daniel Roe is a fairly prominent figure in the Vue and Nuxt world. We follow each other on Bluesky, so it's not as though he's a complete stranger, but a mutual follow and an actual sponsorship are very different things. "Woah holy shit" was, apparently, the gap between the two.

It joins the £15 a month I already get through Ko-fi, which means my total monthly income from people deciding my work is worth paying for now stands at roughly £19, depending on the exchange rate on any given day. I am not, by any measure, about to retire.

The Stripe Mix-Up

Both platforms now route payouts through Stripe, which I assumed meant one tidy dashboard showing everything in one place. It does not. Ko-fi and GitHub Sponsors each set up their own separate Stripe connection for me, because that's how Stripe Connect works – every platform that facilitates payouts gets its own connected account per creator, and none of them talk to each other. Same me, same bank details eventually, two entirely distinct Stripe relationships that have never met.

It's a sensible way for Stripe to structure things, apparently. It was still mildly disorienting to go looking for my money and find it split across two accounts I hadn't consciously created twice.

Leaving PayPal Behind

I'm not sorry to see the back of PayPal's involvement in any of this. The fees, the currency conversion faff, the general sense that a chunk of whatever small amount someone sent me would evaporate somewhere between them clicking "send" and it reaching my account – none of it was worth the hassle for sums this modest. Stripe, even split across two separate connections I didn't ask for, is a noticeably less painful experience.

And the Tax Question, Briefly

I did the maths, because five dollars and fifteen pounds a month sounded like the kind of thing that might eventually require a spreadsheet and a moment of panic. It doesn't. That works out to somewhere around £200–250 a year, comfortably under HMRC's £1,000 trading allowance for miscellaneous income – the threshold below which none of this needs declaring at all.

Even still, I’m collecting invoices to cover my arse.

So for now: two Stripe accounts I didn't know I had, no PayPal, and a combined monthly income that wouldn't cover a decent takeaway. I'll take it.