Direct Payments

Overview

The mainstream “charities” have an almost zero-effort way to make contributions. Most are direct debit, sending money out of your account every month with no need for you to do anything after you’ve set it up. It looks like we may have a way to make our system almost as easy as that.

Lightning is an almost instant transfer of bitcoin from person to person. It costs a couple of cents in fees. Anyone who already has bitcoin can easily set up and fund a lightning wallet, but if you don’t know anything about bitcoin, there’s still a way.

Go to mtpelerin.com and first of all, change the currency you want to receive to sats from the drop-down menu. BTC will send it to a bitcoin wallet and the fees are much higher that way. Fill out the forms (they won’t ask for KYC). You can then set up a regular direct debit from your bank account to Mt Pelerin and each time your bank sends the funds, Mt. Pelerin will send the bitcoin to the wallet address you entered. Full instructions are included on the site. So long as you use the correct reference number, it will work.

Be sure to change the currency to sats!

The easiest way to get a lighting wallet is to go to coinos.io and set one up there. You’ll get yourname@coinos.io as your lightning address to send BTC to.

Back to Mt. Pelerin, if your recipient can liaise with you via some messaging app, you could cut out one lot of fees by sending direct to your recipient’s lightning address instead of yours. To confirm that the wallet is one that you have access to, Mt. Pelerin will give you an invoice for 1 cent and ask you to send that amount to them. If your recipient can be online the same time as you, they can send the 1 cent if you forward on the invoice to them.

  • Bank transfer is way cheaper than credit cards.
  • For the first transaction there is a delay of 7 days (for security) but subsequent payments will go as soon as Mt Pelerin receives the payment.
  • In Namibia it seems you can use AstroPay and M-Pesa—M-PESA works fine for Kenya so hopefully it’s the same.

Sponsorship Payment System

How months work

  • Each sponsor pays per calendar month (e.g., “May 2026”)
  • The system tracks last_paid_month (YYYY-MM) per member in the group file
  • No duplicate payments for the same month — the API rejects them

The grace window (5-day rule)

DateWhat the button showsWhat you can pay for
1st–5th of monthPay for current monthe.g., May 2026
6th onwardsPay for next monthe.g., June 2026

So a sponsor who joins on 3 May can pay for May now. After the 5th, they’d pay for June. They can never pay more than one month ahead—this prevents sponsors from pre-loading funds that recipients might spend against income that hasn’t been committed yet.

Data stored

In the group file (userdata/sponsorship-groups/evans.json) each member gets:

json"last_paid": "2026-05-03","last_paid_month": "2026-05"

What the UI shows

  • Not yet paid → ⚡ Pay for May 2026 button
  • Already paid → ✓ Paid for May 2026 (greyed out text, no button)
  • After closing the modal post-payment → page reloads and flips to the paid state