Scenario: you’re using opensource software and you aren’t donating yet, however you have enough money left over every month to do so. Something(s) is holding you back from donating. Think about what that is and what would have to change for you to change that.
Technically, nothing. I do not get much of disposable income and I did donate to 2 projects that are my favorites. Others are on the way, but not sure when I will be able to in near future. I really want to support them.
What would stop me from donating is frequency of how I use that particular project. Say, I run uptime kuma. In reality I barely use it and no one except me even knows that I run one. I might as well just disable it and nothing would change in my setup. There is not a single service integral to my setup that I need to inform my users (there are like 2.5) to check uptime of.
As another example, Tailscale will skip my donation. A useful thing, yes. They have paid memberships and their free tier is barebones WG setup that is just easy to do. They are getting paid by commerial users. They dont need my 50 euros as much as say Jellyfin does.
The other point to skip donating would be vibe coding. I doubt vibe coding project will be updated enough, will be secure, and generally a solid projects. Everything I’ve seen so far is either abandoned fast, has some major vulnerabilities, or does something that other projects have already figured out. I skip even trying these.
Other than that, if I’d have a disposable income that I can spend on anything, I’d donate to all (F)OSS that I use. The community rocks and we should support good software anyway.