Donationware: you must donate to use it. Not like regular optional donates.
I think pay what you can/want is a great concept, but calling it donation is kinda misleading
FairEmail is a privacy oriented email app on fdroid which uses donation to activate pro features. €0.10 to activate one time and €7.50 for unlimited future devices. I think it's a pretty fair deal.
https://email.faircode.eu/donate/It's a fair deal, but the point is it's not a donation. You can purchase pro features, and that's great. But it's not a donation if you get a product in return, that's just a purchase.
And op asked for real life examples and that is what this person is answering to
You can use it for free, you just need to donate to get rid of the banner and to get all features.
The bare functionality is in fact free
I'm not disputing that. I'm just finding it silly to call purchases donations.
I think FreeFileSync does make some additional features available when you donate, which I don't think would otherwise be available.
https://freefilesync.org/faq.php#donation-edition
In a lot of religious areas, you're not allowed to buy religious iconography.
But if you make a set-price donation, they'll give you religious iconography as a completely unrelated gift to recognize your piety.
Escortware. You're not paying for the software, you're paying for the time you're using the software.
Itch is free, with optional donations.
Donationware is "Please donate to continue"
I dunno this lacks nuance… I think this could easily be referring to different economic situations. The concept of donation usually has this implication of not being a for-profit entity or for a indie developer’s side project. These kinds of apps usually are still either open source or source available which is different than closed, proprietary applications. With this focus on money, I would assume that “free” is meaning gratis where users can often be the product & while the source is not available …or some VC-funded product where they are loss-leading a free tier now just eventually charge everyone later which is hardly good, with a dash of open washing to taste.
