Protip: patrons and sponsors do not want to know all the details, and certainly not up-front. What they want is to know what you're asking for, what you offer in return and then (briefly) how one leads to the other. Thus:
We make Pypy, which does X and is used by Y people, including projects such as Z, z, and z'. We'd love to bring Pypy to Apple's exciting new M1 hardware, but that needs resources.
We're looking for $CASH_MONEY to buy some M1 hardware that we can develop, test against, and eventually run the repository on. With #NUM_MACHINES available, we believe was can have PyPy available to all M1 developers by %CALENDAR_MONTH. We also like eating and drinking and if you send us more money we will spend some of it on !GOOD_TIME(HAVING).
The whole approach of 'we're not asking for much, just x would help' is how volunteers talk to each other, minimizing their ask so that reorienting effort is not too burdensome for anyone. But how you talk to each other is not a good way to talk to external readers, because it requires effort to parse what you are getting at and then further effort to negotiate and arrange everything which is a distraction from their own concerns. Many people would rather just give you some cash and sign up for a monthly progress update.
There's a reason services Kickstarter etc. work so well: they save the donors time and entanglement. Just set up : PyPy on Mac M1 for $5000?' or similar and make it easy for people to throw money at you.
> I would do it myself for a small amount of money.
Out of curiosity, what is a ballpark, a rough estimate of the "sufficient money" for a project like this?