Andrew, if you're listening, add some higher thresholds on Patreon, you'd be surprised. Someone who's willing to give you money (any amount, even $1) is probably also willing to give you $5 or $10 (impulse spending, basically).
That said, because it's normal for people to pay more than you ask, it's not a bad idea to have a higher level or two if you have lofty goals for it.
I don't think it's really impulse spending though. Most of the people on my Patreon are people I talked to for a year or more on social media before they signed up.
Note, the total number of donations I've received is ~20.
Methinks you don't understand how Patreon works.
If people are willing to give him more than that without him offering additional incentives, there is a downside to providing other levels in that there is administrative overhead on the back end to make sure people get the incentives they paid for and distinguish those who gave $5 without wanting other incentives from those who gave $5 because they did want those incentives.
Etc
If the point is to free up his time to focus on Zig, more pledge levels potentially distracts from that without necessarily increasing his take, given that the developer community is already willing to give him more than a dollar just to support letting him work on Zig, without anymore incentive to them than that.
When you set your default, you are implicitly saying "this is what I think my software is worth to you". That's an anchoring point. Most people who decide to donate less than the default will probably feel slightly bad for doing so. Some of those people who would just stick with the default at $1 will also stick with the default at $5. Some people will generally always give more than the default, and that "more" might be even more if the default is $5 than if it's $1.
It's probably incredibly rare that someone would click through, see a $5 default (including the possibility to donate less), and say "wow, this person is full of themselves thinking $5 is reasonable; I'm not going to donate at all in protest". So there's little to no downside risk in raising your default by a non-crazy amount. Obviously some defaults are absurd; $1000 would be crazy and probably off-putting. But $1 is certainly a low-ball.
> Most people who decide to donate less than the default will probably feel slightly bad for doing so.
If the default amount is too much for me, then my choices are to donate less and feel slightly bad, or not donate at all. It will be pretty tempting to keep my money, rather than give some up and feel guilty anyway. Paradoxically I might even feel less guilty for not donating, because that's a passive act and I can tell myself I'm only postponing the decision, rather than definitively making an ungenerous choice.