There's a lot of FOSS software i've used over the years that have helped me in times when I could never afford proprietary alternatives and as i've gotten older and made more money i've tried to go back and donate or buy prebuilt binaries of that software when I can.
Honestly, the existence of such software has helped me so many times in life when I would have either had to fork out unreasonable amounts of money or pirate things.
I wish open source maintainers and devs got more credit for the work they do. I bet it would be hard to figure out just how many lives have been enriched and bettered by their work.
https://liberapay.com/ is a great 3rd party middleman / alternative to Patreon that doesn’t take a cut of payments (so arguably the best of all worlds).
You meant to say: it is nice that they [Liberapay] don't take an additional cut of payments on top of the processor.
Are you able to raise this up to $1 million? Or $10 million?
Or is your niche software forever relegated to $200,000?
Also, we've received much more income than that. Ardour is more than 20 years old at this point, and generating revenue for more than 12 years.
Also, your estimation of how much a software engineer earns would be fairly humorous anywhere except a few major tech centers in a few western nations.
4) try a modestly priced subscription approach. Try to be 100% clear that this is not a licensing system, but rather enables you (and others) to keep developing the software. [ EDIT: essentially, Patreon but hopefully without another 3rd party middleman. ]
Works for us at ardour.org (on the order of $200k this year, through a combination of donations, 3 and 4 above).