If you look at the last few posts in Flypig's gecko dev diary seems like there are quite a few people willing to donate to such efforts that impact endusers. While not sure if donations of 5$ would even cover a coffee for each day @flypig spent on this effort, maybe this is the way to go with jolla looking into subs etc? Bounty board and have ppl voting with their wallets if they want another mdm functionality or something that helps end users? (I really wish such donations would be enough to get such talent as flypig back into jolla’s ranks, one can dream) Still the idea is not that bad?
Edit: and while I’m pretty sure (again guessing) flypig won’t really care for the change money he could get from it, it would be a good way to judge community investment in features? It’s no longer russia that dictates OS development, with subs it should go back to community, if say 20% would be interested in proper pgp/gpg support, maybe @dcaliste (I don’t believe he’s jolla employee) should get some kickbacks from it, instead of developing multi-user support so the big comp/country can save a few bucks on not having personal phones (pretty sure Damien is also employed and donates his time as a hobby), but let those in community who wish to support development with their wallets have their say? What’s wrong with this idea?
There was a company in the past, had quite similar business plan. It worked, only for a while. Soon it turns out it wasn’t enough. Sadly the best that can be done is subscription 
Otherwise you won’t be able to get enough of money to support this.
As I said, donation money for sure will not cover coffee costs for flypig, but at least having a way to judge community feelings (especially the community that can and is willing to shell out an extra $) would work wonders now that jolla is coming back to community for ‘investment’. Btw what company do you mean?
Synergy, now called Symless.If I remember properly it was working such way that you voted with $ for features. If i remember 10$ was one vote. And when you place few votes ( I think 3 or 4) you were getting lifetime license 
It was when they were very very small company and just starting with the project. Something like that.
Thanks, never heard of them (i think?), the only bounty boards I know that kinda worked were with those pocket pc devices during n900 era and some devs made a nice living of that (but they were all: pls port this game or that, not core features, this is a problem as some things are too tied to silica to count on foss devs even being able to start, that’s where the ‘decoupling’ comes from)