Standardwaste
The goal is to not only keep it alive but to keep it thriving. Your approach would be the best for this. I would definitely say this is the way. But this is not what grapheneos is, sadly. We would already be on a whole new level if it was for subscription. It aims to be a non profit organization one day. Hopefully so successful that I could help other privacy and security projects.
We need to find a solution how to make more of the end users aware of the situation. It's not that grapheneos is dead, but we need to prevent it from dying. It would be ideal to just brainstorm about how this could be done best.
We know that all other channel doesn't succeed.
So we need to start to think of a reasonable way how to present this to the actual user. It's the device.
There are different scenarios how this could be done.
I'm not sure how it is in other countries but in Germany you can buy a Paysafe pin in every gas station. They don't want an id if it is below 50€. A lot would use this here for donation.