Hey everyone, thank you for this thread! I agree, a feature to gift patronage would be great. We’d love to offer this feature, and there are really no cons to doing so! Unfortunately it hasn’t been prioritized yet. While it sounds simple, it’s a bit more complicated to build gifting on Patreon than it might be on some other platforms.
Most gifting features use a link or a code to grant a specific length of time for free, like a month. What most people expect when they get a gift card for a free month is that they can redeem it anytime they like, and get a full month for free. But Patreon has a 1st of the month billing cycle, and access to your memberships is tied to that cycle. For example, if a patron signs up during the month of August, and they only paid for the month of August and didn’t renew, they would lose access to your membership on the 1st of September when the new billing cycle happens. So if we offered gift cards tomorrow, we’d be in a situation where we’d have to explain that the gift cards either can only be redeemed on the 1st of the month, or that they are only good for a portion of a month, depending on when you redeem it.
That doesn’t mean it’s impossible or that there aren’t some potential workarounds, but when we’ve discussed it internally we’ve concluded that we’d have to build something fairly complex to make it work with our current billing cycle. Or we’d have to offer something that would not work that way most people would expect it to work. It is still on our wish list, and we would love to offer it, but we haven’t been able to prioritize it yet due to those complexities.
Closing this thread today as part of the project Hayley describes here, but this topic is not lost or forgotten. Thanks you for your thoughts here.