Once you take money, you are running a business (even if you mislabel the money as a donation). That means having to register with the tax authorities, adding a

Once you take money, you are running a business (even if you mislabel the money as a donation). That means having to register with the tax authorities, adding a ton of accounting related overhead and very likely spending money on all of that overhead (e.g. when hiring an accountant to offload some of the overhead). At some point you realize that you have to ramp your business up, just so it pays for the cost of accepting money. Then it's no longer a side project. I'll just leave this here: https://raccoon.onyxbits.de/blog/software-development-cost/ https://raccoon.onyxbits.de/blog/software-development-cost/