"My $100 (or whatever) isn't likely to be the difference between something being funded or not; " It absolutely will. I have a very close acquaintaince in the

"My $100 (or whatever) isn't likely to be the difference between something being funded or not; " It absolutely will. I have a very close acquaintaince in the process of doing hardware (and I have experience with this myself). Getting the first production run is brutally difficult, and the operating captiol requirement just doesn't exist. VC's don't want to pay for it, and neither do business development banks. Though I think there is a lot of scamming ... 'hardware is hard'. Really hard. I actually believe a lot of it is 1/2 way - they raise money with good intentions, but then are just stupid and lazy in getting production up, and then can't afford it. Once a team has 1 million - if they get production up, maybe they get 100K in profit. But if they 'fail' to get production up ... they can keep maybe $700 in 'profit' i.e. what they didn't spend on units. Maybe a better solution would be to have escrow and pay on delivery, with partial payments or something like that.