yeah sorry I've seen one off carpentry projects for lots of money and I've worked on software projects for individual companies, and it's not really comparable (especially going back to the earlier post that started this, which I thought was not discussing say the newest spotify competitor or something similar)

however I suppose at the point where I need to explain that and all the ways in which the two things are dissimilar it becomes a book in itself.

We are all talking about exceptions to the exception at this point. It's typically uninteresting to discuss...

But at the risk of being uninteresting, I know of incredibly niche software projects that were done for a single rich benefactor as one-offs simply for their personal use-case and no one else. Years in the making and quite well paid. In one case effectively lifetime employment for the sole developer.

They are obviously incredibly rare, but they do exist.

However, they are totally irrelevant to discuss in this context since it's a rounding error of 1% of 1% of current developers who would get such roles either via luck or skill.