I'm seeing some conflicting comments in this thread. Feels like some people are confusing us with the server admins, and also how Lemmy works in general.

Some points:

• Lemmy is defederated, so Lemmy can't just start charging API fees. Lemmy does not control the API in that way. The devs have no power over that except for their own instance (here at lemmy.ml). I imagine if any server admin started trying to charge for API usage, people would just stop interacting with that server.
• We would never ever put ads in Memmy to make money. We both absolutely hate ads and would never do that. And if we did, someone could just fork Memmy, remove ads, and make that available to users. But I promise as long as I'm involved with Memmy, there would never be ads. I am positive gk feels the same way.
• Other than gk's small server that he's running for push notifications, we don't really have any expenses specifically for the app.
• gk has an open collective and buy me a coffee for donations. He's also looking into setting up a recurring donation option in app - but at the moment this would not give you anything in return, it just would be a way to donate a couple bucks a month.
• gk is working on this much more than I am, as he's between jobs at the moment and I have a full time job. So that being said, I'm not really interested in monetizing Memmy (unless I could make as much money from Memmy as I do at my job which I doubt would ever happen). But since gk is basically working on this like a full time job, I can't speak for him and his goals. He's also the actual owner of the app, I'm his sidekick 😎.
• At very best, if we ever paywalled anything (not sure if that's even allowed with our open source license), it would just be like extra icons or something. We would never put any actual features behind a paywall.

Sorry for the rambling, I am very bad at organizing my thoughts. Let me know if you guys have any questions.