I wonder how it would fare if a service followed the Amazon wishlist kind of deal, and have random unrelated users directly pay some amount to the service provider, bypassing the site owner.

For instance Linode would expose 30 purchasable items for a site, and each item purchased by a user would pay for 1 day of uptime. As a tradeoff, money going to the project maintainer would need to go through Patreon if they set one up.