Payment definitely is needed, unless you're offering to host it for them.

I hate ads just as much as everyone else, but if that's how they are planning to pay for hosting/time, it is absolutely needed.

You can have ads without the tracking, just like @andrepd mentioned.

You can, with downsides. Uninformed ads have less value. You can also make people pay, and have no ads.

You can do lots of things.

But it is needed. Nobody builds a job board "just because". There is always a monetization angle of some sort.

How much are you willing to pay to remove the ads?

If nothing then perhaps it was needed.

You can have ads without ubiquitous invasive tracking. This is a common false dichotomy used to distract from the issue.

Is the ad revenue the same with and without tracking? I have no experience of this, but economically, it seems unlikely that less personalized ads would pay as much as more personalized ads due to likely lower click-through rate?

It’s significantly less without tracking unless you have other methods of demonstrating your audience is sizable and niche.

We do not have Google Ads or other Ads on entrylevel. Our tracking is Google Analytics, Mix Panel, Sentry, and Facebook Pixel. Other tracking software has been disabled since I passed my free tier haha. We only track for analytical reasons to improve UX and for bugs.

exactly.