Perhaps that troubles some people more than others, it's just that for me a purchase is a simple, binary choice -I either agree with what they're asking for, ba

Perhaps that troubles some people more than others, it's just that for me a purchase is a simple, binary choice -I either agree with what they're asking for, based on the best information that I have about it, or not and I don't. Depending on the asking price, I will spend some time to research, in order to minimise my chances of being disappointed, but that's straightforward enough. Whereas when I'm faced with a donation button that leads to an empty box waiting to be filled, or even to a number of presets, my mind goes in too many directions: "Is this particular project more worthy of donations than dozens of other free software projects I am using every day? What am I using every day, let me think, Linux, FreeBSD, Xorg, GNU, vim -jesus that'll be a long list, I can't donate to all of them. Well maybe I could just give a few quid to all, but donating a few quid to some of these projects would be a joke -the big ones receive a lot of funding regardless. And it would be too much effort just to find the details on how to donate anyway." So now I have to factor in not just how much value I would attribute to each project which is hard enough as it is, but also how much difference it could make -how much the project is in need of funding. It just feels too arbitrary and exhausting to deal with all this, so in the end I don't bother. Obviously some people don't overanalyse things and just act spontaneously -sometimes I do too, but rarely. I don't think I'm the only one that has this mental block. On the other hand if a project says "you like this project? If so, please click here to donate $x" -then that's awesome, I like the software, it's asking for $x, $x is a reasonable amount, so I just do it and move on. Or I don't, if I don't think $x is reasonable (I don't think that's happened, normally free software authors are very modest in what they're asking when they do that). Giving me a single choice taps to the spontaneous part of me, asking me to pick an amount myself triggers my analysing part. The ideal for me would be if there was a platform that asks you to put a total amount you're willing to spend every month, then asks you to select the projects you're using and a rating of how much you appreciate each, then it factors that along with some objective development activity measures to distribute the amount between the projects, perhaps with an increased weight to smaller projects. I think someone actually posted a similar idea here recently.