@brianmcf I want to reiterate the business importance of this feature to every creator who has an external websites. We NEED a reliable and fast API. I can understand if not every feature makes it into the API, but the essentials of payment processing/status info is a critical feature that we need to be able to absolutely rely on.
The API is of paramount importance to every creator with an external website.
If this functionality stops working, or goes back to the state it was a couple years ago where it took an extra 17 days into the month to get the API data updated, any project that has an external website is just not going to be able to rely on Patreon for payment processing.
Even at a small number of patrons, doing things by hand is cumbersome, slow, and error prone. Manually exporting CSVs is NOT a usable workaround, since decline recharges happen at various times during the month (not to mention CUF projects). I can’t even imagine how this will affect larger projects with thousands of backers.
More than any other single controversial change, letting the API slide into an unreliable state will push your largest projects to different payment processors. A fancy mobile app is a nice to have feature, but we don’t depend on it. We do depend on reliable data so we can give our patrons a good customer experience.
Sidenote - Why am I only finding out about this by browsing another thread in this forum? This announcement should have been pushed via e-mail to every project who has an API key. You are not hearing the full pushback of everyone this affects because they simply don’t know.