Hoping this is on-topic. If not I can delete.
I own a couple of FOSS projects on Github, and have been toying with the idea of adding some kind of bounty to a few issues, since I do get a (small) amount of income via Patreon from which I’m happy to use to encourage contributions.
I’d rather keep things visible inside Github itself rather than hosting issues on yet another third-party site I would need to administer. I know there have been services like this in the past, but they seem to eventually stop paying out bounties and just disappear.
I’ve seen “boss.dev” showing up in my Google results and it looks to do what I want, but I’m skeptical since there seems to be no reviews or community around that tool.
I'd simply use "bounty" tags on issues, like some cryptocurrency projects do
Is it not ok to put the bounty there in writing and send the money without the help of another service?
I guess I would be ok sending the money on my own. But these other services have the nice feature of allowing other users to contribute to the bounty into a single pot. I.e., I can put a bounty of $20, then user b also really wants the feature and will add $5. When the PR is approved, the developer is guaranteed $25 and doesn't have to contact user b to send their $5 or give out their financial info to X number of people.
The first bounty I would create for any project of interest is a bounty to move the bug tracker out of Github so those who boycott Microsoft can at least participate in the QA process.
So having a bounty mechanism inside Github is a bad idea. As a MS boycotter, I would be excluded from contributing bounties via the mechanism you propose.
Well, I'm using GitHub. I don't know what to tell you.