I understand you don't plan to make money, only to cover costs. Nevertheless, I believe you would benefit from a more explicit "business plan". Your Gold support plan kind of fulfills that purpose (email support and an invoice), but right now it's kind of hidden in the middle of a donation request, and flavored as a donation. You might convince a lot more mba-type people to support you if you also extend the same offer under a heading like "business plan" (where you make it clear that commercial use is free, but you can subscribe to this totally-not-a-donation plan for email support)
Do you think it'd be more clear to only accept donations on GitHub Sponsors and only offer actual support plans on the website? I mean actual email support, helping companies migrate their existing map stack to OpenFreeMap.
If you aren't doing this for a living and getting paid for it, or having someone else do it, you should reconsider either A) providing the support or B) how you make money.
You may think it noble to "only take donations" just to pay the hosting cost, etc. but providing people support is a completely different thing. People are stupid, needy and inconsiderate of your time, feelings and experience.
If you don't want to run ads, great! But your time should be compensated fairly as well. You should be charging businesses for things, with a substantial cost for substantial work. Charging a business is not the same as charging an end user and you should not be averse to doing so.
If you don't want to charge per request, you could also offer two pools of backend servers: free servers that are provided on a best-effort basis with fair-use-policy, and paid servers that are exclusive to people in the $150/month plan.
The latter should be easier to manage with more predictable traffic, while giving you more leeway to deal with abuse on the free servers if it ever becomes an issue.
Yes, I was thinking about that, it might actually be a good idea. Provide a premium service with SLAs, while providing the SLA-less service for free, with two pool of servers.
To be honest I don't see the problem with making commercial use non-free.
(a) They're making millions, you deserve a cut of that.
(b) If making money makes you more likely to be around in 10 years, that's attractive to businesses. Nobody knows when your donations might suddenly dry up.
The thing is that hosting this really isn't that expensive. My first GitHub Sponsors goal is to reach $175 per month, which would cover the hosting on Hetzner. Of course this cost can grow if the project gets more popular, but it's a good start!
I honestly believe this project can cover $175 per month eventually.
Of course there is the countless hours which went and which can possibly go into this, but to cover the hosting is still meaningful.
Let's say 1 year from now your day job gets toxic and you have to work 18 hours a day just to pay your rent and expenses. Are you still going to maintain this?
What if the economy goes to shit and you have trouble scraping that $175/month? How long are you going to pay $175/month for something that isn't making money?
What if, instead, this became a part-time job of yours?
If I was a commercial user of your product, some assurance that your random personal situations aren't going to affect the product stability for a long time would be a good thing.
