Yes. Yeah, stretch goals are stupid. Rewards tier X. Costs $ to provide and ship to customer. Minimum pledge amount is Y. Amount of 'extra' you make is PROFIT

Yes. Yeah, stretch goals are stupid. Rewards tier X. Costs $ to provide and ship to customer. Minimum pledge amount is Y. Amount of 'extra' you make is PROFIT; Y-X. Stretch goals seem to imply that if you hit the funding target $$$ now everything over that is Pure Bonus PROFIT and goes towards making an Extra Awesome version of whatever the project was. ...but it doesn't work like that does it? Backers aren't stupid; they will by and large pick the most optimal pledge level (you see it all the time on successful projects). That's the pledge level that minimizes the PROFIT level to the project runners. So really, when you make a million on top of your goal, what you're probably making is 1,000,000 * low profit factor, and the stretch goals you see for some projects are just ridiculous (eg. we'll ship extra stuff to all pledge levels! <--- totally smashes your PROFIT total for these pledge levels). Poorly thought out is exactly how I would describe it. Kickstarter should make people submit a budget excel spreadsheet that details exactly how much they expect each reward tier to cost, and how both a exactly-on-budget successful funding, and the 10x surplus funding will broken down into spending on delivering the project. That doesn't have to be made public, but how can kickstarter stand there and go "we're good guys" when they're running projects for people who clearly haven't done this, and as such neither kickstarter nor they themselves have any idea if they'll actually be able to pull of the project when if its funded.