[giancarlostoro]

Meh.

So op is fine financially, but people who are asking for money usually tend to be doing "free" labour and sometimes not employed, or maybe they are employed and would like any additional financial aid to offset their personal costs (time is also a cost, you could be consulting for $$$ instead). I help admin a Discord that receives a few hundred dollars monthly in donations, and we're still way in the negative in terms of what we've spent on the community.

I would not make foolish assumptions when someone's asking for a "coffee" that it "costs" them nothing, the same argument applies against me and my friends, sure Discord itself costs us nothing, but the bot hosting does, the game server hosting does, there's a cost to a lot more things that might not be immediately obvious to everyone.

If freenode asked to buy them a coffee, I think any of us who used IRC long enough might "buy them a coffee" because we know the infrastructure is not free, the time invested by the maintainers, etc.