I believe getting enough people to donate on a regular basis requires two things: a certain amount of customers have to be real fans of your product, and they have to be aware that the product ceases to exist if nobody donates.<p>Both aspects are a challenge for software: most people see software as a mere tool, and most people don&#x27;t see the need for updates (and in fact see them as annoyance).<p>That&#x27;s why a twitch streamers or youtube creator can easily get decent amounts of donations while donation buttons in software go completely ignored in almost all cases.<p>Open source is the one existing model in software development where donations work with some consitency (though donations are mostly in terms of development time, and some widely-used projects still go completely ignored).<p>For closed source there&#x27;s are a few working examples with passionate fanbases (mostly games), but for the most part we haven&#x27;t figured out how to do this well yet.