I would love to be able to gift my long term supporters and legacy supporters a ‘free period’ to get some of the content. I had people support me at the start (4 years ago) who are not Patrons now; and I have released loads of content since then.
If I was able to gift them a free month they could go in and get all the new materials since they left, and maybe the new stuff might remind them what they get for their support; or maybe they left in a time when I was not as prolific with content releases, and they may reinstate their subscription!
I would also like to be able to gift to recently unsubscribed supporters who have given a little over a long time and have had to quit because of recent financial strife.
Also I have a bunch of friends who also have Patreon accounts and I would like to be able to ‘grant access’ to my content in exchange for access to theirs rather than both of us handing a fiver back and forth
Don’t get me started on how annoying it is that the money you give as a patron comes out of the pot that your patrons have pledged to you. Why can’t creators just pledge to other creators using a debit card or personal bank account or something? We literally just pass the same money back and forth, minus fees.
We have 2 patreon accounts and have patrons asking us over and over if they can “gift” a patreon membership to another patron, who can no longer afford Patreon. We are nearing the end of 2020 and this has been mentioned for way over a year now. Can you give us an update? It would a great thing to promote for holiday gifts and also a wonderful “giveaway” for the creator to be able to give to their patrons. Thanks!
I’m going to hazard a guess that Patreon is in no rush to do this, as they can’t collect money from the patron. This goes part and parcel with my view that they do not properly understand that patrons are customers of creators, not of Patreon, and that Patreon’s role is that of content hosting and payment processing. So many changes they’ve made recently reinforce that belief, and their inattention to needed changes does as well.
Gifting patronage
Ability to remove a patron from a tier without blocking them
Not sending ‘you have been blocked’ messages when a patron is blocked
Not listening to creators who do not want the hassle/confusion of multi-currency tiers
The feature to gift patronage would be extremely useful. I have wanted to use influencers for marketing, but without being able to show them the content, it’s near impossible at the moment! This is not only of interest to creators, but also Patreon itelf: more influencer marketing -> more patrons -> more fees to collect.
I’d be for this, even if it was a very simple system where I pay Patreon the price of one of my own tiers for a specific number of months myself and then give it away one-on-one.
Why pay Patreon? I have no way to know or prove this, but one of the reasons they haven’t made this possible yet might be because it would increase their costs without bringing in more income to cover it. Solve that and maybe we’ll finally have this feature.
The value to Patreon would come about if the gifted patron signed-up, though that is something of a bet on the future. Your solution is elegant and would work.
I wish the folks at Patreon would say more than just that they’re considering it. We can speculate all day but it would be so much easier if they came in here with their own pros and cons.
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.
