I pay for BitWarden, not so much because of any feature in their premium offering as that they are critical infrastructure for me and have acted consistently ethically. Also the annual Wikipedia and for a while Mozilla monthly. Way less than what I feel is deserving.
However, I have been working on building a social foss funding site where you set a total recurring donation amount which is then distributed by the Method of Equal Shares accordrding to weights you specify, ether manually or sourced from your os package manager.
Main benefits of that approach is that your budget is fixed, you can spread it over an arbitrary number of recipients, and priority is given to those that are more unique to you.
Would love to hear thoughts if anyone is interested. I hope to maybe test out an alpha version some time in 2026 if time permits.
Selfhoster on NixOS here too.
Nix (and operating services on a NixOS machine) is a learning curve, and even though tho project is over 10 years old now the semantic differences between the conventional approach to distro design/software development/ops is still a source of friction. But the project has come a long way and lots of popular software is packaged and hostable and just works (when you are aware of said semantic differences)
But when it works, and it often it does, it’s phenomenal and a very well integrated experience.
The problem in my exparience with using LLMs to assist is that the declarative nature of Nix makes them prone to hallucination: “Certainly, just go
services.fooService.enable = true;in yourconfiguraton.nixand you’re off to the races”. OTOH, because nix builds are hermetic and functional they’re pretty safe to include as a verification tool that something like Claude code can use to iterate on a solution.There are some pretty good examples of selfhosting system configurations one can use as inspiration. I just discovered github.com/firecat53/nixos that is an excellent example of a modular system configuration that manages multiple machines, secrets, and self hosted services.