I had this idea recently: if people are willing to pay a small fee monthly for streaming services or Photoshop, surely some would also be willing to pay a similar amount for the FOSS they use. Even a few cents monthly would add up to quite a substantial sum over a vast userbase*. In light of this, I’ve started working on an app that records your app usage, and then at the end of the month splits whatever sum of money you want to donate amongst the apps in proportion to the time you spent using them.
Then it will (hopefully) let you donate to all of those projects with a single click.
Since it’s only halfway finished, I’m posting this to gague how much interest there would be in such an app. Could you could see yourself using something like this? Do you have any ideas for what I should add/change?
*(It also occurred to me that perhaps one way to fix surveillance capitalism on the internet would be if every HTTP get request came with a microtransaction (eg 0.01¢) attached; those without money would gain those 0.01¢ by seeing ads, like today)
Woaaaaaaah ok that survey idea is super cool. Although I’d argue that paradoxically it’s the rubbish apps that the bulk of the money should be directed to, to give their authors the resources to make them as good as the other apps. I guess it could almost be a Kickstarter-style system where you have to publish a barely-working MVP but if ppl vote for it then it’ll get a larger share of people’s donations. Wait I think I’ve just re-invented the wheel here.
I think the ideal is that it would be a conscious decision to donate more to software that needs more work. It definitely wouldn’t be good to encourage poor usability that creates more usage time. (That’s how we ended up with terribly written recipes all over the internet that make you scroll for ages before you get to the useful information)