Joey Hess has shown how crowdfunding can work for free software projects: by setting achievable goals, working consistently towards them and writing near-daily text updates about the code. He recently finished his 12 month Kickstarter campaign, achieving lots of stretch goals.
Now he's at it again, but using his own homegrown funding platform which accepts paypal or bitcoin. Check it out, and donate if you like git-annex, want secure encrypted cloud storage tools or just get a warm fuzzy feeling from Haskell/Yesod apps.