Accepting payments? Yikes!

Hi everyone! I'm Travis, I've been a software developer since 2006 and I've worked on a good number of open source projects and side projects. Recently I integrated Stripe for the first time in one of my projects, in order to....*gasp*....charge users and accept payments. The integration was easier than expected, but it still feels kind of slimy to be asking for money for something that was a side project and I just built for fun. On the other hand, I'm using OpenAI credits, so if I actually gave it away totally for free, it would simply cost me more and more money as time went on, especially if it went viral (the dream). So I justify the payments as a scaling/sustainability measure.

Interested to hear others' perspective on this one. Is accepting payments completely shameless? Does it sully the reputation of your project? Necessary evil?