Thunderbird has all I need for RSS, newer style readers I find tend to be lacking in some way.

Selling support or related services is one way, I think Stallman gave the example back in the day of how he made money through selling physical copies of software (before online distribution was universally viable). The software was free and could be re-distributed, but a profit could be made from providing the service of doing the distribution.

On a bigger scale (although they’re not so popular at the moment), historically Red Hat has been the go-to example for how to make money in the spirit of free software. They fund and contribute to many upstream FOSS projects, and in return they can make a fortune out of selling commercial support for that software, while the software itself is still free.

I believe if the developer wants to make money from their apps, there’s noting wrong with it, as long as they are ethical.

Nothing wrong with making money from FOSS apps, even Richard Stallman wouldn’t have a problem with that.

With open source it is “community software”, and if this aspect of it is strong then the line between users and developers can be blurred somewhat, ordinary users may feel attached in a similar way as developers, so @Rentlar@beehaw.org’s suggestions could still apply for getting a better response from the community.

Some communities also have to deal with a lot of demanding, entitled people (which I’m not labelling you as) and so may have set the defensive threshold a little high, and so coming across as being constructive about the project goes a long way.