[farbodsaraf]

$3 donation is never going to get us rich, especially when the conversation rate for such apps are normally below 5% of the user base. The primary reason for asking donation is to measure and validate your idea. One of the way to check your market-fit is to who's freely willing to pay for it.

The other reason is to cover our Heroku cost ($7 per month) and any other costs (e.g. domain name, the time we put in making/maintaining it, etc.). Nevertheless, please can just ignore and continue using the app for free.

But thanks for the feedback, you are right about the message, we thought it's too long to describe it all, but we'll try to come up with a better and clearer message.

[namanyayg]

Just say you want money for your app. Put a pay-what-you-want or heck, bill for it monthly.

I really don't think it's the right idea to blatantly lie, it's quite obvious that server costs are negligible here. No one is denying your work or effort.

[cameronbrown]

What's wrong with the donation model? That way this website can help people as well as stay afloat.

[r3bl]

Yeah, I agree with the other comment.

> "For us, in order to be able to cover our server costs, we ask our users to contribute a tiny amount if they find the app useful. Donate to see the detox counter again."

As far as this message goes, I'd just remove the word "server". We all know that's not the only cost associated, so pointing it out as the only cost seems... dishonest? Maybe you'd want to link the word "costs" to a web page that elaborates on the costs a bit. Not with concrete numbers, but more like percentages: 60% on the time maintaining it, 10% for the server and domain(s) etc.

As far as the funding model goes, I feel like pay-what-you-want would be a good strategy for this use case, but that's up to you to decide. I'm certainly bad at monetizing my projects, so I'm in no position to make suggestions.