Its a larger frustration with a lot of open source projects though. I'd love to throw some money to say thanks, but its either really hard or convoluted. The easiest way I have found so far is with android ones, I just buy the paid versions on there.

The main issue with that is that it simply doesn't provide anywhere near enough money to pay a real team.

Our forums, for example, have about 17.7k users according to help.nextcloud.com/about

Let's say we get ALL those users to pay 10 bucks per year. Not going to happen, of course - but let's say we put in a lot of effort there. That can pay for 3-4 developers. We have 25. Should we really spend time on that? Or spend that energy on getting a few big customers who pay 100K each?

We have explicitly chosen not to even TRY to monetize any installation under 50-100 users.

That means we don't try to squeeze money out of small businesses and home users (for example by not fixing issues for those users to try and get them to sign a contract). Instead, our incentive is to make Nextcloud easy and good enough that anyone <100 users can just use it without needing us. Because then 1. they don't ask too many questions on our forums and github and twitter etc and 2. they advocate for how great Nextcloud is to our real potential customers: businesses with 500 to 50 million users.

Of course, if community members want to donate or if contributors want to earn a cup of coffee, there's always https://www.bountysource.com/teams/nextcloud But our employees aren't allowed to take money out of that, they have to donate it back to issues they/we care about.

I understand and very much respect your prespective. If I was in a company that could use your software, I would point them to you.

If you don't mind from a single home user, my prospective was: I really like Nextcloud, I want to at least send some money your way. I know it won't sustain you, but for all your software does for me, I feel like I can donate. I go to your website, I look at pricing, and the lowest pricing I saw was 1900 euro for 50 users. I didn't even know bounty source was an option.

Now that I know bounty source exists, I will send money on that. However, may I suggest to put bountysource on your main website so folks like me can at least support you (or if your employees can't take money out of it, give folks like me a way to give you money)? I get the fact that running on that won't sustain a business, but I would like to think that if users saw that on your website, you would get more money that way.

Or maybe for a thought too, I brought up Android on the previous one. I forget which app I had, but they had a paid and a free version. I looked at the paid version, and it said something along the lines of "this version is no different than the free version. However, if you would like to support us, please consider buying our paid version." Their monaterization was not more intrustive than that. I bought the paid version, because I knew the money would go to the developers.

If perhaps you doing any monaterization is too much if a pain that it isn't worth it (or you don't want to alienate anyone, or perhaps if people pay then you have to support and its too costly), I understand. However, I would like to think you would get some return on investment by some simple non-intrusive ways to monatize your product.

And since I didn't say it before, thank you for the software. I know I can't give enough back to sustain your company, but your software is in my daily workflow and is an amazing product. I have also been responsible for getting several other people to use it on a daily basis, and they depend on it as well.