The Argus is/was a great Canadian plane. How does crowd funding work

There's a link to the Wikipedia page in the news story. Basically you make a payment of an amount of your choice and it's held in an escrow account until the deadline for the fundraising is over. If the desired amount got donated, the funds are released to the project. If the desired amount is not raised, each donation is returned to the person who made it. In this case, if you make donations matching or exceeding certain set amounts, you get some recognition for your contribution toward the project.

I looked at this, and thought not a bad idea. But then gave it some thought, they are raising money to pay for the design and engineering of this kit from everyone, if you contribute $200 or more you get a copy of the kit. But in the long run, once the molds are complete, the company can continue to pull in the benefits in terms of kit sales from those that "donated" the cost of engineering the kit for them. I would think a better approach would be to determine the demand for the kit, and maybe have people put a deposit down to show interest, as opposed to have the model community paying for it, and company getting free kit engineering that they will make money from down the road.

The basic idea with crowd funding is for a whole lot of people to donate an amount of money they won't really miss to see a project happen that they'd really like to see happen and which otherwise wouldn't. Each person gets to decide what amount it is that they wouldn't miss.