Brian Smith had a good string of tweets that summed up my thoughts on it, but I can't find it now. There's two parts to why Patreon feels inappropriate for me:

Brian Smith had a good string of tweets that summed up my thoughts on it, but I can't find it now. There's two parts to why Patreon feels inappropriate for me: The units are too small to be realistic for a market rate salary for a software developer. If a single developer's salary is six figures, trying to fund a whole team this way a dollar at a time spreads the "crowd" too thin. Second: There's no established deliverable associated with the donation. It makes sense for people who are doing something like making YouTube videos on a regular schedule infinitely into the future, but for a software project, you want to see more specifically how the money will be spent, how much it will cost to complete a project, and what the expected timeline is. Kickstarter's model is much more appropriate for this. The developer can give an honest estimate, "We want to build X. It will take us Y time, and we need Z dollars to make it happen." Then everyone donating can better judge how much to spend and know what they can expect for their money. This is more fair to both the developers and the donors.