I work for a very small startup that uses hundreds of big or small open source projects. And we never pay a penny for any of them.
And I don't think I can go to my boss and ask for a meaningful contributions to any of these. We are not profitable and there's no reward for that contribution.
However, if there was a way for me to subscribe to micro payments for a few projects, given some easy trivial incentive, we definitely would've.
I can easily subscribe to $5/m payments to like 5-10 projects that we use. Would've meant nothing for us. But economics of scale would've kicked in for them.
Allow $1-10 monthly subscriptions, give the backers a badge or something they can use when hiring. Maybe show a badge next to their usernames on github or whatever. Maybe show a badge to the issues the backers create so they get a sense of priority. slowly you can build a small habit of people/companies subscribing small amounts to projects they use.
If there was such small incentives I would've immediately subscribed $5/m to following project:
* Nodejs
* Postgres
* Node-Pg
* Rabbit MQ
* Grapesjs
* Esbuild
* Webpack (Which I badly need to improve it's killing us everyday)
* Dokku
* Metabase
* MJML
It's in my company's benefit for each of these to survive/thrive and keep improving. I am afraid that once/if some of them stop that'll hurt us. $5/m and potentially getting some attention from maintainers (in smaller ones) if we had issues would be enough of an incentive for these all.
The incentives I suggest:
* Badges on Issue tracking on the issues created by backers
* Badges next to usernames on Slack/Discord/Irc/Whatever
* Badges on Github profiles for backers
An example: Docker. They started rate limiting their free tier, asking for $5/m. I don't care about the $5/m at all. My biggest problem with that change was not the $5/m, but the time I had to spend on our different tools setting up auth environment variables.