Since the very beginning Sci-Hub is supported by donations from website users. I do not have other sources: there are no advertisements, mecenate support or government funding although there should be. All information on Sci-Hub is free to access. Users keep the website up and running by donating small sums.

Donate in a decentralized way

Sci-Hub accepts donations in cryptocurrencies: a hi-tech, decentralized version of money.

To donate by Bitcoin use the new address:
bc1q7eqheemcu6xpgr42vl0ayel6wj087nxdfjfndf

You can also donate to the old address:
12PCbUDS4ho7vgSccmixKTHmq9qL2mdSns

other
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questions

‐ I do not know how to use or afraid to use cryptocurrencies, do you have other options to donate?

‐ Using cryptocurrency today is very easy, to get started, just install any popular crypto wallet on your mobile phone. At the moment Sci-Hub does not have other options to donate because of legal complications, but these options will be added in future - keep watching for updates!

costs
The running of Sci-Hub website costs a few thousand dollars per month. Apart from technical part, Sci-Hub is fighting legal and political battle for free knowledge. Donate and help open science win!
history

There is a mythology around Sci-Hub funding, which claims that Sci-Hub was somehow funded by Russian government. That mythology was promoted by academic publishers to create a bad image of Sci-Hub. In this section you can read the real story of Sci-Hub funding.

Sci-Hub started in 2011 with zero initial funding. The script was running on a free web hosting. Because there were very little users at the beginning, Sci-Hub did not require expensive servers to run on.

People loved the service and asked if they can support it by sending donations. The very first option to donate from Russia was by sending SMS message. But it did not last long, because the operator charged a very high fee: 50% for every SMS.

At this moment I also experimented with advertisements on the website. Some people clicked them deliberately to help the project. But these ads were bringing minuscule amount of money and made Sci-Hub look ugly, so they were removed.

I later added an option to send donations using Yandex.Money cyberwallet. That became one of the main options to donate.

In 2012 I maintained a public list of all donations Sci-Hub received, to support the idea of transparency. But with growing number of donations it became too time-consuming and I stopped. However, you can look at the archived version of the old donations page here.

first fundraising campaign

In September 2013 I started the first fundraising campaign on the website, to collect money to buy servers. These servers were need to create a mirror for Library Genesis database, that stored around 21 million papers by then. The total size of the collection was 16 terabytes. The total cost of the servers was around 4,000 USD. Donations were collected from Russian website community, and the sum was collected in 12 days. The number of Russian users was 3,000 people every day then.

frozen PayPal account

In 2013 I also added an option to donate with PayPal for international users, and started a fundraising campaign. Donations started to come at a cosmic speed. Many donations had notes attached to them, saying Thank you for access to research! or some other good words. In a couple of days two or three thousands of dollars were collected. But then the account was frozen by PayPal because academic publisher Elsevier complained.

Later I tried registering another PayPal account, and use it carefully, but after some time it also got frozen. I have several frozen PayPal accounts by now.

bitcoin donations

Sci-Hub started to collect bitcoin donations early, after some of the users recommended adding a Bitcoin wallet. Bitcoin was very cheap then, and it had a reputation of an anonymous cryptocurrency that is used by hackers and shadow projects - such as Sci-Hub. In 2015 the price of Bitcoin started to grow. Sci-Hub collected some bitcoins by that time, so it was possible to buy new high-performance server. In 2017 the price of Bitcoin increased tremendously, and Sci-Hub became a very rich project. The money were enough to pay expenses for a few years.