PayPal acount limited because of Donation received!

A warning to plugin developers who include a PayPal donate button in their plugin or to site owners who have a donate button on their site.

I recently received an email from PayPal saying that limitations had been placed on my account and they wanted proof of my non-profit status. It doesn’t make any difference that I am not a non-profit but they don’t give you any way to explain that or even tell you why you think you are.

Long story short, after phoning them it turns out the issue is that I received a donation for my plugin and “the donate button is used predominantly to solicit donations for charitable purpose”. Although after explaining why I received the donation and sending copies of a voided check and company incorporation information my account has been restored but I have been asked to “remove / replace donate button with other PayPal button (e.g. subscriptions button) on your website” and that “Continuing using Donate button may lead to future limitation again”.

WTF? Don’t PayPal know that thousands of WP and other websites use Donate buttons for gratuities to be paid? What other options are there? Just look at the number of plugins available specifically for the purpose of adding donate buttons and tutorials on how to add them (including from WordPRes support themselves).

Now I know why so many people hate PayPal! Is there a practical alternative to using PayPal for receiving donations and payments from clients?