In Slack a distinction between pro / sponsoring users and regular users was recently discussed.

Currently some history tables are very large (see #270), which is causing load on our limited resources. If we were to introduce some sponsoring (eg through Patreon), we would be able to provide

• limited history (eg 1-2 years) to regular users
• unlimited history to pro users

This would involve (at least) the following steps

• decision on supported sponsoring mechanisms (PayPal, GitHub Sponsors, Patreon)
• a way of exporting affected data for those that want to keep it locally but are unable to sponsor
• announcement with sufficient lead time
• some way of connecting the sponsorship with a gpodder.net user
• a background job that removes old historic data for regular users

Any ideas, suggestions, comments?