The classic approach to this is running a business that offers hosted versions of the self-hosted technology for a price, and offers documentation for self-hosting the stack on the same page. Users click the button for what they want.

Universal Basic Income.

But if we want self-hosted software to become a real alternative to commercial services, we need people, especially developers, to care enough to build and maintain it.

Is it a real alternative. And not just that, in many cases it's better. There are many good projects out there which developers care enough about to maintain that make no money at all, simply because those developers enjoy doing that, or if they see the benefit to building such software.

Sometimes they provide solutions like paid hosting while keeping the self hosted version free.

Europe is increasingly funding projects through NGOs and government foundations. If FOSS software is a public good, then we should devote public funds to it.

Some projects offer paid hosting for those who can't or don't wasn't to self-host. Some (particularly mobile apps) push a paid version to stores to subsidize those using FOSS sources to download.

I'm the lead dev at my job. I started using a self hosted software because it was available to me without asking for budget. We used it for about 8 months and during budgeting, I decided to add this self hosted software to my teams budget because the self hosted software grew to the point where I didn't want to manage it anymore.

Call it wistful thinking but I still believe donations are the way forward.

But it requires a bit of a shift in both willingness and ease.

Currently donations are also distributed pretty unfair, they go mostly to the user facing side, while crucial packages remain forgotten.

I would almost suggest some kind of system where you could set aside a certain amount of money, and it would donate automatically to all your installed packages, with some kind of weighting system I suppose.

Use whatever channel the developer provides.

Everyone deserves to be paid for their labor, since we don't live in a post-scarcity world.

Charging corporation. Making it free for personal use and nonprofits

You have correctly identified the core issue with open source.

Personally speaking, as inefficient as it is, I think that donations is the best way to support a self hosted open source project.

Followed by paying for licensing to be able to get support for the product.

If your project is open source any other restriction out there, you can't really do because they can just fork and patch the software to remove the restriction.

Due to that restriction(or lack of), I've always personally seen most open-source projects to be more of a hobbyist or personal project then a project that someone wants to do to make money.

First find a way to track your costs. Measure how much it costs to give it away (to your self and people that support you starting it as a buisness). Do market analysis based on those number. How much do you need to support both your operatiinal costs of hosting and devoloper time paid with a fair wage, and what does compare to how much consumers are currently paying. If that looks good invest in an accountant and lawyer to see what the buisness plan viability might look like and set up a LLC. From there look for partners that can help you create a sustainable buisness and fill in skill gaps you dont have, or hire out the rest.

Thats it.

Even better make it a community coop so that the skilled labor and community can have actual ownership in the org to help balance out thr risk and encourage litteral buyin.

Are You talking about https://heaper.de/

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