I'm the founder of Streak where we directly monetize our extension (as do others like Grammarly). Have you tried directly asking your users for $ given the effort you put in?
Most FOSS android apps asking for donations do that: Sometimes a button in the donation-nag "I already donated", but pretty much every time a setting "stop asking, I either already donated or won’t donate".
Good thing nobody said that.
> The developer gets joy and gratitude,
Your average free software doesn't get very much joy and gratitude back from users either.
> they can live a happy life. Why bring money into it. Money does not make happy.
If the implication was too subtle, the idea is that when you spend a lot of time making something valuable, it should go towards obtaining food and shelter and the other benefits of a living wage.
And those things do make happy.
Money is an important type of value, especially the context of labor.
And, let me phrase this very precisely: there isn't an obvious non-monetary value they're getting back that comes close to the effort they put in.
You mentioned joy and gratitude but again I'm not sure how much of that they get back in this situation, plus there is the flip side of lots of complaints.
In this view, trying to make money from it corrupts the noble mission.
Agreed, making money from charity doesn’t make sense.
Business revolves around secrecy and restrictions.
Whereas open-source revolves around transparency and freedoms…
Some extensions are monetizable by honestly asking users to pay for access. Mine just isn’t. It’s only as popular as it is because it’s free and open source and promises total privacy.