My yearly spend is approximately €500, give or take a little. Fortunately, I can afford to do this. I hold no judgement for those who are not in a position to do. My only motivation for contributing financially is to ensure the free, functional, ad free, privacy preserving software I love continues to exist. It needs to exist especially for those who cannot afford to pay a corporation for proprietary software. A shout out to all the developers who adhere to FOSS principles. Each new year I make a list of the software I've mainlined and similar to the article I allot an amount to each one based on my usage. Many times it's time-tested old-school tools, but we're seeing a lot of new development with Rust apps, crates and TUIs. This year I added Matrix. Also EFF, despite not being directly impacted by that jurisdiction. They truly are holding back a giant wave with global repercussions. It's not always easy to justify the time spent creating FOSS tools when there's bills to pay, mouths to feed. Thank you - You know who you are.

Many projects accept donations, for example for server costs or travel expenses (conferences, meetings). You can setup recurring monthly transfers to projects whose software you use most often. Examples are the Free Software Foundation for various GNU tools or the KDE project.

A few years ago I paid for winrar cause I had used it for free for about 15-20 years at least

I want to help but I'm making zero money. Zero times any percentage is zero.

Great article, thanks!

I'm now on fixed income but I appreciate FOSS. I usually try to donate, especially if the project accepts bitcoin which I've had for a while so it costs me less. Too bad many projects don't. That includes Wikipedia and they keep asking why I stopped.