When you're making hardware, there's a logical way to structure backer rewards by offering the first units off the factory line. You can give these to your early backers (to incentivize them to sign up) or to people who back later but pay tons of money.

With software, there is no equivalent of "first unit off the factory line". You could artificially create this dynamic by releasing the software in phases to different tiers of backers, but this would probably just anger people because it's entirely artificial. There are also limitations around apps, for example Apple won't let you offer TestFlight beta testing as a reward. And of course, you can't let people buy an iOS app through Kickstarter either.

I had to think creatively about the rewards/tiers for my software kickstarter, which was successfully funded. [1] We let people who paid a little money vote on a certain set of features, and people who paid more money could both submit options and also vote. We also had branded mugs for higher-tier backers as well, which we drop-shipped via Costco (note: only offer this to US-based backers...). I think these voting/nominating tiers would work well for most software, since it's costless to let people vote, and you want to make something that your users want anyway.

1: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/72264020/read-across-th...