there are very strong cultural factors preventing such billing model from catching up, on either side of the deal
I myself had something like this in mind decades ago, thinking of providing a web/platform/service to barter such deals, but it never made it past the design stage before I was convinced it was a fool's errand - and that was even before I started doing contract work
I'd be interested to listen if you can provide detailed real-world examples of how do you see this working
In this bit:
> I'm saying you ask for some 20-30k per feature request that takes approx. 1 month of work. And if the requesters of such feature can't pay this, then cannot afford to request (basically i'm using a contractor rate above, but you substitute the level of pay you intend to make).
how do you envision this negotiation taking place? coders, let alone younger ones and/or OSS-attracted ones, typically suck at this, on the following levels:
1- all work takes "a bit of effort" to "a weekend hackathon" to "two weeks™" - both on the client end, as technical challenges are often invisible to the client, and on the proud coder end who tends to overpromise a lot (combination of overconfidence, wanting to "give the best deal", and other psychological factors)
2- people are used to dark patterns and seeing concrete figures puts off a lot of people and has a strong impact on the perception of projects - also, the internet is worldwide and in most of the world a moderate pay will be seen as greedy or astronomical
3- judgement on whether the work is done, or ongoing, or satisfactory - this will always lead to some friction, and most people don't want to deal with it; coders gravitate to jobs where this shit work is done by someone else, typically on lower emoluments, leaving the higher rate for himself (we're usually a "he" let's face it)
From these, 1 is (roughly) the inner challenge, 2 is the outer challenge and 3 is the structural challenge. Perhaps 3 is the strongest of the 3, as it essentially boils down to the business model competing with a more traditional, tried-and-tested company/employee paradigm. Since a good coder commands a good pay these days, the traditional model needs to suck a lot to a lot of people before the coder (let alone the project lead coder or the CTO/CEO coder) is better off outside of "the system"
perhaps I should finish up some write-up and then open a discussion, but who'd read it heh
long story short, these OSS-with-tips arrangements will remain in the hobby/side-gig range for most people, except if you hit gold somehow in a superstar economy; I don't see this changing in the foreseeable future