I can think of one case where it works, the Octoprint software for managing 3D printers. The main developer Gina Häußge is fully financed by the Patreon. Though

I can think of one case where it works, the Octoprint software for managing 3D printers. The main developer Gina Häußge is fully financed by the Patreon. Though of course this is Germany, I think getting US developer salaries would be much less likely. You probably need to be in the right niche for this model to work, I'd suspect it is quite hard to pull this off. But that goes for most ways to get paid for open source.