I only have experience in non-development creative work, but one-off payments/donations are much more anxious than monthly. Sales of t-shirts/songs/ebooks could be higher than what I get monthly on Patreon now, but:
1: I could never be sure. One month it was $0, the next it was $3, the next it was $40. This is impossible to plan around. It's even worse now with everything moving to SaaS. It's easier to justify a subscription to something like EastWest Composer Cloud or Splice when I have a bunch of people subscribing to my work who've been there for months or a year.
2: I didn't know who they were. This was fine in the good months, but then I hit long stretches with nothing coming in, and I had no idea why. Did the platform make some change? Did my products fall out of fashion? I was at the mercy of opaque storefront logic and priorities.
And I don't mean in the creepy surveillance state sense. I know most of the people subscribing to me on Patreon through Mastodon. When they unsubscribe, I know why because they tell me. I sold tens of t-shirts years ago. I've never seen someone wear one. Nobody sent me an email. Sales collapsed one day and never returned. Patreon subscribers tell me good things about my music and writing all the time.
Neither of these is 100% a problem with one-off contributions, but the level of communication never matched this.
This is my experience as well. I've done both, and made more money off one-time software sales (rather than patreon-supported OSS) but it was completely unpredictable. There are toxic outcomes from that: you start tailoring your output to what you think the market will do big numbers on, rather than what's good. Being a small business person can be brutal and it doesn't always lead to you doing good work: it can lead to very cynical exploitation of your perceived market, just to survive for another month.
1: I could never be sure. One month it was $0, the next it was $3, the next it was $40. This is impossible to plan around. It's even worse now with everything moving to SaaS. It's easier to justify a subscription to something like EastWest Composer Cloud or Splice when I have a bunch of people subscribing to my work who've been there for months or a year.
2: I didn't know who they were. This was fine in the good months, but then I hit long stretches with nothing coming in, and I had no idea why. Did the platform make some change? Did my products fall out of fashion? I was at the mercy of opaque storefront logic and priorities.
And I don't mean in the creepy surveillance state sense. I know most of the people subscribing to me on Patreon through Mastodon. When they unsubscribe, I know why because they tell me. I sold tens of t-shirts years ago. I've never seen someone wear one. Nobody sent me an email. Sales collapsed one day and never returned. Patreon subscribers tell me good things about my music and writing all the time.
Neither of these is 100% a problem with one-off contributions, but the level of communication never matched this.