You give them money for two things. Your paying the dev so he doesn’t have to work two jobs and can focus on just this one job. Which is ideal for a major project that the lead dev is full time on the project.

And two if you use someone else’s infrastructure. If you arnt using your own hardware then you should be fucking paying money and not being a free loader.

Self host if you don’t want to pay. You get all of the features, there’s no restrictions and you can do what ever you want with it.

Honestly I’m getting pissed at all the stupid projects that charge you money for self hosting. It’s stupid as fuck.