Ads should be viable here. "The ad ecosystem is broken" is not something individuals should have to fix.
And asking for an entire coffee for a quick tool is not really in line and unlikely to get many takers.
And there's no good way to ask for microdonations.
Bonus question: ads with tracking cost X, ads without cost Y. In actual numbers tell me how much more X is worth. 2Y, 10Y, 100Y? (There are studies on this)
Also my memory suggests 3x. But I'll go check.
Top result says 2.6x from ftc.gov but is from last decade.
Another result says "Targeted ads are twice more effective as non-targeted ads, and retargeted display ads encourage 1000 percent more people to search for a product." In response to that, I will note that even if google could not discern the site content at all, that would only affect targeting and not retargeting. So that suggests 2x at most in this situation.
Ads, as long as they have not been banished from the world, should be viable in some form on a small useful site.
There are ideas about how to get rid of ads entirely, but I wanted to be more grounded to the current state of things for the purposes of that comment.
Buy Me a Coffee is not literal, it's a service to collect contributions.
I like the idea of microdonations, and I think it would be healthy for the ecosystem if sites could implement one-click 50 cent paywalls, but that's pretty far off.
I know it's not literal, but the size and donator effort required makes it a very bad fit for small interactions.
the whole point is to only get donations from people willing to do the effort - with no downsides to others
Extra effort is just a negative. So is needing relatively large donations to overcome transaction fees.
i wonder if apple makes it easy to accept money with apple pay (they allow peer to peer payments via apple cash after all)