okay, so an update for everyone, based on the donations and voter poll in this thread, it seems that allowing everyone to donate once in a while is the way to go vs any kind of subscription model. this does makes sense given the kind of culture surrounding stp.
i've managed to combine the two in the 'milestones' system i mentioned before, just using the same donation system we had, but making it a little more clear that once we pay the bills for the month that we're still taking donations for my the work I'm putting into StP each week. this is taking the form of the 'buy me a beer' and 'buy me a burrito' progress bars that now appear after we've met the 'paying the bills' goal.
upon switching back to donation model (from subscription) we've already gotten several very generous sized donations, so i feel like this is a pretty good compromise between the system I was trying out at the beginning of this thread and our old system that folks seem to be more comfortable with.
honestly, it also takes less effort on my part with the not having to ship stickers/postcards and whatnot. i will still be shipping stickers to anyone that earned them (only one person so far) and will still be making the stickers I was showing off in our discord and making them available to buy in our
etsy shop.
so thank you to everyone for helping me find the best way to go about this, i think this will be the best solution for things going forward.