Kickstarter can't be used to raise money for causes, whether it’s the Red Cross or a scholarship, or for “fund my life” projects, like tuition or bills.

Indiegogo has no problem with it though.

Kickstarter also requires each project team to sign up for their own Amazon payments account. Why wouldn't Kickstarter just collect the money and then wire it / cut a check to the funding recipient?

Also, why does Indiegogo charge upfront while Kickstarter waits until the campaign is successful?

The whole crowdfunding space seems to operate pretty illogically. Are there legal complexities that aren't apparent to an outsider that force their hand?

Nobody is stopping you from doing that if your desire is absolute freedom in how you collect donations and what you do with them. The point of Kickstarter is to find a balance between allowing creators to do whatever they want and helping them end up successfully funded.

You sarcastically say good luck with that as if this isn't a proven method that leads to far more success, but it is. While it's always been possible to solicit donations for a project, it's really only been successful and widespread since the the existence of projects like Kickstarter that put pressure on the creator to actually deliver.

The pretty website and the name aren't what makes Kickstarter successful. The rules are. Nobody was waiting all this time with a project they wanted crowdfunded just hoping for someone to launch a website to make putting that up easier. They were waiting for a platform that users trust and are interested in. They wanted a chance to actually be funded if they chose to put themselves out there. If they thought they could get that "with freedom" they would have done so already.

So good luck finding people that want to throw money at your ideas with no rules, restrictions or protections in place. I think you'll find it's a pretty shallow pool. Keep in mind that absolute freedom from the perspective of a creator equals absolutely no accountability from the perspective of backers and crowdfunding requires both to be successful.

Without violating my NDA, I can share the following:

Both companies have the same set of goals: to provide a marketplace for innovative ideas. They have different ways of achieving this.

Kickstarter does this by allowing select projects to be associated with its brand, which due to their selective nature, confers a perception of trustworthiness to potential funders. You know that there's very little chance of a Kickstarter project being a scam, and moreover, that the project you fund will probably make good on their promises.

This is why they've stopped allowing product mockups -- to lower risk for funders.

Indiegogo is more liberal, allowing your project to succeed or fail based on the strength of your network, rather than the additional trust conferred by the brand itself. While the guys over at 'gogo are really focused on preventing fraud, the very nature of 'every project can be funded' means that more projects will fail to ship.

In my experience, Indiegogo is really great for projects where the goal is not some type of new product, but rather some sort of well-understood goal. Like saving a clinic for pregnant woman in San Francisco, or raising money for a child to get a lung transplant. Kickstarter is more about innovation -- Cards Against Humanity, the Pebble watch, etc.

Same goal, different ways of getting there. Basically, Kickstarter is Apple, Indiegogo is Facebook.