[TangoTrotFox]

Look at sites/software/etc that is offered for free that you believe offer very high value. There's a recurring trend. In spite of the value offered, the developers invariably end up short of revenue. This tends to result in ever more visible requests for donations or alternatives (such as swag) to try to spur revenue. And even with these appeals, the revenue tends to rarely correspond in any meaningful way to the value of what's offered.

As an example Lichess (www.lichess.org) is an amazing service for playing chess. It supplanted services like ICC (internet chess club) and now competes against services such as chess.com and really stands head and shoulders above the rest of the sites. Now let's consider compensation. ICC had on the order of tens of thousands of users and charged around $50/year for what would have required extremely little overhead. They were undoubtedly making millions. Chess.com today is heavily ad-driven and works hard to push their users into a premium access model. No idea about their revenue, but they happily spend 5 figures a year in contracts just to get various players/streamers to exclusively play/stream on their site, and have an extensive paid staff. In contrast to these two sites, the founder of Lichess is able to gives himself a salary of $22,218, about $2k above the French minimum wage. It's not like he's then getting loads in options each year - that's it, that's what he gets for building software that beats out other sites making countless millions offering arguably inferior services.

It sucks, because I wish this model worked, but I think it simply does not. There are exceptions, but they are definitely the exception.