aah, you mean the funding for nostr itself?

it's worth remembering that nostr is actually just a bunch of standards, published to github

it's not a piece of software in and of itself

Nostr is just a bunch of markdown files. That's it. Funding is barely needed, as all the maintainers have vested interests in the success of the protocol.

We do have to trust those maintainers to make sensible policy decisions, but those conversations are entirely public, just go to the github site and hit follow and you will receive it all in your inbox

as a developer I prefer to build on nostr as my application will not be subject to arbitrary policy decisions / api changes / deprecations by platform providers in the future

I also benefit from integrated payments, users bring their own social graph, zero passwords required, native messaging systems...

all of which makes it faster and cheaper to create solutions

you don't even necessarily need to rent a server, you can build a client and make use of the relay network