Ask HN: How can I sustainably run a website without charging a fee?

As to how you can reduce costs: Get VPSs and a free CDN or two, and engineer your website to be heavily cache reliant, resistant to intense backend load, and easily horizontally scalable. If you do it right, $50 a month will get you more than enough performance and most of your bandwidth and load-balancing will be free (the CDN).

As to donationware: Sure, if people are seriously invested in your product or community. But that might take time.

Coming from a sysadmin: Don't let people intimidate you out of doing it yourself. If you can successfully set up Tor, you can set up the infrastructure for a large website. It's not that much of a learning curve because there's a billion tutorials out there that'll show you how to set up different tools to work together.

Dwarf Fortress is supported solely by donations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorf_fortress

Metafilter, a web community, recently had a funding crisis and has managed to handily cover it with donations (in a scenario where the owner did not so much ask for donations as got told "Shut up and take our money").

Though, that's a community, not an app. The principle is the same though: If enough people want it and value it, yes, it is possible to get donations. But, first, you need people wanting it.

Best of luck.

But then again, the post is from 2 years ago :)