Well what I'd like to do is establish a stack of budgets against a project, e.g. Kickstarter Goals.
$500 p/m = all hosting and domain costs paid for
$750 p/m = we'll use some paid service that makes the service better in some way
$1k p/m = we'll reward contributors $250 p/m distributed across those who contributed to PRs but exact distribution determined by repo admins
And then to have a budget associated to the lowest one being the means for the project to survive... with a running total on that one, showing deficits (because I do have to still cover raw costs and those end up on my credit card the months I fall short, so future months should help recoup that).
In this way, it would be extremely clear what funds a project needs to survive and how donations and support makes a difference.
NB: My projects do fine... we get enough support to be viable. But damn it would be great to not manage it all manually, it's a chore I'd like to give up so I can code more.
I'm sure it's possible to put that info in README.md and handle things according to that month's donation amount.
I don't know that a GitHub-run tier system will suit everyone, when a developer (the primary users of GH, of course) could easily just automate the update of the relevant info in the README or some other relevant document in the repo on a cadence that suits the project and the developer.
$500 p/m = all hosting and domain costs paid for
$750 p/m = we'll use some paid service that makes the service better in some way
$1k p/m = we'll reward contributors $250 p/m distributed across those who contributed to PRs but exact distribution determined by repo admins
And then to have a budget associated to the lowest one being the means for the project to survive... with a running total on that one, showing deficits (because I do have to still cover raw costs and those end up on my credit card the months I fall short, so future months should help recoup that).
In this way, it would be extremely clear what funds a project needs to survive and how donations and support makes a difference.
NB: My projects do fine... we get enough support to be viable. But damn it would be great to not manage it all manually, it's a chore I'd like to give up so I can code more.