Absolutely. Imagine how much more you can help if you had a team helping to build and grow your website. If you want, don't take a dime for yourself and instead invest it all into growing your business and helping others. If you're delivering something that gives real value to someone's life, and it's priced correctly, they will pay for it.
Can you help anyone if you're homeless on the street?
At some point there is a trade off to any number of choices. I choose to keep active employment, and open what I can, when I can. Mostly utilities that I wrote for work that aren't core functionality that it makes sense to separate out anyway. Heaven help me if something got too popular and people wanted a support model.
>Here is my great question, can I help more, if I charge money?
It depends on which dimension of "help more" you want to affect.
I looked at your website "efficiencyiseverything.com" and here's how I would break it down: "more people" vs "more features"...
- if you want to help more people, it's better to keep it free because no subscription/paywall payments means the biggest audience (including those without discretionary income) can be helped by your information
- if you want to help less people but add more features, you should charge money. The paying audience will always be less than a non-paying one but the ones who do monetarily support you can be assisted with new website features that requires revenue to develop
(One can sort of try to get the best of both of the above scenarios by keeping it free with voluntary donations but to me, that just simplifies down to "free" since the percentage of donators will be very small.)
>if you want to help less people but add more features, you should charge money
I would add one more thing. It would help less people in short-term, but in long-term, it might actually end up helping more people, as those features have the potential to attract way more people than you would have gotten without those features but for free.
You would be able to afford helping more if you charge money, now you're your boss, you charge based on what you believe and know you need to survive and based on periods where you aren't consulting.
But really, I just wanted to help people.
Here is my great question, can I help more, if I charge money?