I've been thinking about the money side of trying to sell things that can be downloaded (mostly games). I really don't like the idea of charging a lot for anything I might create (If I try to sell anything of mine for $25, I'd have to be very confident in the quality... and I am not known for my confidence. ).
Even if I wasn't trying to make money off of anything, though, it'd be extremely difficult (if not downright impossible) to advance some of the projects I have in the works without some kind of funding.
On occasion I'll think about ways to get around having to make people pay for things without necessarily losing money, and for now I only have a few ideas I'm not so sure are viable.

First of all, cutting costs in the development process is a pretty useful step. If I'm paying anyone at all, I'd be reluctant to take on anyone for free, even if they offered as much. I imagine some people would be satisfied with a free copy of the end product in this situation ("Voice this character and you get the game for free?", "Translate it into your favorite non-English language and you get it for free?").
That's not always viable, of course. The job may well be worth more than the value of a single copy of the finished product, or someone might not be willing to take payment in the form of video games. So we'd still need to get something from distributing the product.

Unfortunately, the best idea I have in mind for cutting the customer's costs is to use ads as strategically as can be managed.

For example, say I have a series of pages covered in advertisements. Just viewing ads only brings in like a penny (that's $0.01 for those unfamiliar with the currency), but if I can get people who can't or don't want to pay to run through a thousand ads (not necessarily all at once, since that could cause computers to start attacking their owners with fire!), that'd be a significant gain for me, and it'd only cost them a few minutes rather than their own money (which they might not even have to begin with).
Or, if they're the type who just doesn't want to spend money on an indy product, but one of the ads actually interests them, I'd probably make a whole dollar off of the ad they buy from, and they'd get two things for the price of one.

That still seems like a very unreliable system, but right now it's the best I've got, heh.

Another option is to have a donation system. If that doesn't cover costs on its own without needing to sell things, I could just make it credit-based, so that people build up credits based on how much they donate (same could be applied to viewing ads), and make it possible to order with credits rather than direct payments.

It'd still probably be a long while before I could hope to have anything of enough quality to warrant applying any of these ideas, but as I'm slowly pushing that way and SOPA and PIPA have a bit of attention on piracy, I thought I'd go ahead and bring up the topic.

Oh, and on the ads idea. If I were going to use the ads for people to indirectly pay for products, I'd be pretty well obligated not to plaster any pages other than those for that specific purpose with ads. (Well, maybe a google ad or two to cover server costs..... ok ok, no ads unless specifically requested. )