I'd really love for this to be a thing.... I think the main problem I see is that the true cost of the bounty is dramatically higher than most people (even in the industry) can understand. For example, let's say I'm trying for $100k a year in sales (fairly conservative, I think). That gives me about 250 working days or a daily (sales!) rate of $400. 1 day of development is a pretty tiny feature, but would require that 20 people pledge $20 each. Personally, I'm not really comfortable paying more than about $20-$50 for a single piece of software in a year, so that means that my input is really tiny... Which it is of course. $100k in sales would require 5000 people paying $20 per year, so each person's vote is pretty small.

I think it's all about optics... 5000 people paying $20 is probably easy to manage in a "I'll do something awesome this year, trust me" model than 50-100 "Let's raise money for this tiny feature" pledge drives.

But... It would be really nice if it were a thing... Possibly there is a better way to represent it that makes it more appealing to payers.

> the true cost of the bounty is dramatically higher than most people (even in the industry) can understand.

Only in a few parts of the U.S. with sky-high cost of living and rents. Most FLOSS developers are not in such places. (OTOH, high costs are definitely the reason why there's little-to-no "pure" crowdfunding for things like AAA-class video games, or live-action feature movies. It turns out that the cost of these things is so high that, by and large, people aren't actually willing to fund them when the full cost is made transparent.)