Talk to Gregory Brown, who is a Rubyist who has a monthly donation model, about the economics of doing this as a solo dev. (I know that factoid because he wrote a component which makes my business possible and I give him a sale a month as a donation -- which is the exact opposite of generous and I know that and yet I somehow can't justify ever doing more.)

Making a living on Gittip is an implementation detail, not the goal itself, unless I'm greatly mistaken as to your internal calculus. Your goal is to make a living writing code with some X-factor about freedom or project selection, right? There are far better ways to do this. For example, you're currently looking for 50 hours a month of contracting or $2k of donations. This (and gittip) strongly, strongly suggest that you're undercharging for contracting, probably by a factor of 2x to 5x or higher. You can make a huge impact on your standard of living and job satisfaction just by raising rates, and the execution risk of that strategy is absurdly easier than hoping you hit the multiple independent dominoes you need to do to make the gittip plan work.

There are other product offerings you could make as an OSS dev which would complement your desired lifestyle and be orders of magnitude more efficient that gittip. One such product offering is online training material, such as e-books, screencasts, etc. $2k a month is 40 copies of a $50 ebook, which is very achievable. Or it is a one-day make-your-employer-even-more-money-with-Python training session that you run every six months. Or it is... there are a lot of options here and they're all better than competing with baristas for tip money and losing.

A) My current funding goal is $2,000.00 per week, not per month.

B) I want to make the X-factor of freedom available to as many as possible. I think Zuck won the startup game. How are you going to top him? With an even more bloated IPO? Time to rewrite the rules, IMO.

Yeah, what's up with that? Are US wages so different from European ones? Around here (Belgium, a rather wealthy country), $3000 a month is a good wage. 8k/month seems a little excessive for creating and maintaining a relatively simple service? Am I underestimating the effort involved or the tax pressure in the US?

But owning a company, you have far more costs than being employed. E.g. in The Netherlands (it must be similar in Belgium), you have to pay 19% VAT and add lots of insurances that your employer normally pays a substantial part of (disability insurance, liability insurance). Then you probably need a lawyer, and/or insurance for that. And the list goes on... Things become even more expensive once you start hiring employees, etc.

Thanks for the Gregory Brown tip. :^)

Ooh ... he joined Gittip a month ago. :^D

https://www.gittip.com/sandal/