AKA: Crowdfunding, Pre-order
Proposals from maintainers to develop major features or new versions of the software. Payments are collected via a crowdfunding platform in various tiers and can offer additional countervalues (e.g., naming the version). Often these are one-time payments for one version, but can be repeated if the community support exists (e.g., for every minor version).
Requires:
Variants & Options:
| Characteristics | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Effort to set-up | Days | Some descriptions and bank info is sufficient |
| Effort to maintain | Medium | New description for every new version & development time |
| Cost to set-up | Low | Maybe some costs for making a great video / demo of the future version |
| Cost to maintain | None | No cost after if funding goal is reached. But process is repeatable with next version |
| One-time Income | Medium | Can work for larger versions |
| Recurring Income | Low | Depends on community size & will to fund |
| Income Predictability | Low | Depends on the extensibility of the software (plugins could work better) |
| Full income Threshold | 100+ | |
| Recipient | C | Might be only a sub-group who develop the tools, etc. |
| Additional Work | Low | New version is probably already on the roadmap |
| Visibility | Low | Easy to forget, ignore, or overlook by users |
| Necessity to pay | Low | Voluntary |
| Entry Threshold | Low | Credit card is sufficient |
| Countervalue | Work | |
| Scalability | Low | Scales to the time available to develop new version |
| Effort for marketing | High | |
| Competitors | None | |
| Software types | Progs | Harder for Libraries; Easier for Programs, Tools, Databases, etc. |