Hiya!

Actually this kind of thing is something we really can't do while we're using PayPal.  Getting our own merchant account would make it possible, and in fact would make a lot of things easier, but it would also increase costs and force us to deal with things like credit card fraud.

There's another service a lot like ours out there that does exactly that, but doesn't put a cap on the amount that can be donated.  I heard of this one site that generated $240 in donations from the members and then didn't get any support at all (database-level errors displayed on the page for weeks).  They decided to move here and couldn't retrieve any of the money their members had put in to the “community chest.”

But you mentioned putting a cap on the amount, which should do the job if it's OK to only allow up to 6 months to be paid in advance, or maybe a year so if something happens it won't be too dramatic.  I can imagine 30 people paying for a site, the guild leader granting the wrong type SuperAdmin rights, the rogue member whacking forums and everything, and then finally needing to refund each of those 30 members the dollar they each put in.  I'm not sure how much, if any, of that could be automated.

Sorry, you probably didn't want that much of an explanation, but it's something we've thought about doing.  The trick is to not dramatically increase the amount of time we need to spend on billing and fraud, and also to avoid leaving people feeling like they've been ripped off.  For example, we get at least 1 complaint every two days where someone tells us they didn't authorize a re-occuring charge, when it says in at least two places before the transaction is allowed that that's what's going to happen.  Threats of reporting us to the FBI, to the Better Business Bureau.  We even had one person who said they were in the Army threaten to report us to JAG...  All of this we deal with regularly, and that's with the majority of it taken care of by PayPal.  Eep!