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Open source is ubiquitous and many projects act as critical infrastructure, yet funding and sustaining the whole ecosystem is challenging. While there are many dierent funding models for open source and concerted eorts through foundations, donation platforms like PayPal, Patreon, and OpenCollective are popular and low-bar platforms to raise funds for open-source development. With a mixed-method study, we investigate the emerging and largely unexplored phenomenon of donations in open source. Specically, we quantify how commonly open-source projects ask for donations, statistically model characteristics of projects that ask for and receive donations, analyze for what the requested funds are needed and used, and assess whether the received donations achieve the intended outcomes. We nd 25,885 projects asking for donations on GitHub, often to support engineering activities; however, we also nd no clear evidence that donations inuence the activity level of a project. In fact, we nd that donations are used in a multitude of ways, raising new research questions about eective funding.