Very few people donate because they feel benevolent. Most Patreon type donations come because companies either want to sponsor further development or need a mai

Very few people donate because they feel benevolent. Most Patreon type donations come because companies either want to sponsor further development or need a maintainer for the critical OSS components in their stack or both. If you are only looking for couple of hundred $ per month then you can probably still find it via benevolent donations. But if you're serious and want to spend more time on the project then move to freemium model. See RescueTime for motivation. Best is to keep all existing features as free and think of one solid new feature you could build that can be sold as premium. In your case that could be "sync reading progress across devices". If I'm super user of Polar, I would want to access progress on my phone and get some reading done while commuting. Just saying. Lastly, if you only convert 5% of current users to premium then it's 100 paying users right out of the gate. Not a bad start eh. So stop relying on donations & think of capturing the value you are creating.