I guess pro-rata would be a cool feature and wouldn’t create misunderstandings. I know that Patreon is warning new patrons about the fact that they will be charged again in a few days, but some of them don’t read that. I had a Patron who complained and was shocked that she was charged week after first charge.
My solution to such cases is to refund those people on if they stick for the next month. Send them a nice message saying you appreciate their support and don’t want them to be charged for full month if they signed up 7 days or so before the end of the month.
The simplest thing would be for patreon to charge patrons on the same day of the month they signed up - it would avoid all this nonsense. I get being charged on the 1st seems cool and then your money is all there on 1 day, but yea
In the end, it really comes down to it being “one size does NOT fit all”.
Being “cool” has nothing to do with it. O.o
I prefer my payments on the 1st because my main project runs on a monthly schedule and that works the best for me and my patrons (my other project isnt monthly at all and being billed on the day they subscribe during a billed month creates a real problem as
it is a biannual publication. Makes things more complicated than it needs to be.)
If it was on the day they subscribed, it’d be no different than the situation I was in prior to starting patreon, which was way more complicated and it would make my monthly cycle, which works amazingly for myself and my patrons, moot. Patreon has simplified
a lot of things for me and if it was no longer monthly (pro rated would be a fine addittion imo), it’d be detrimental to how I would like to run my projects and in one case, needs to run.
Not to mention all the reworking I’d have to do on my adverts, FAQ and more with a big change like that. Change happens and I deal with it, but this was a change patreon tried to push in the past and it was massively disliked and now with the new plans, it
also removes the founder perk of batch processing which would suck.
I would love to have the option of both so everyone could be happy but also if one person’s page charged on the 1st and another charged on the day of signup, and one person pledged to both, it would be a big pain in the ass keeping track of all that on the
customer side of things too. As a patron I much prefer having it all come out at once instead of all over the place. Even if it we’re 100% on subscription anniversary date right now, as a customer it would frustrate the heck out of me. It’s so much simpler
to have one lump sum go out once a month than individual payments scattered imo. Already deal with that for a lot of other things and patreon being a lump sum in or out is so nice.
I believe this was already discussed, and even if we ignore creators for a moment, it doesn’t really work for patrons either. Patrons supporting multiple creators will have higher payment fees on their pledges and they will have harder time planning their expenses.
^^^^^ Just wanted to chime in and say I like this above idea a lot!
A pro-rated fee based on the day of the month also works for me… and could actually be used for marketing to try to entice people to give your Patreon a chance in the last days of the month?
I have definitely experienced the “wait a moment, why am I paying for the full month on the 29th if I’m going to be charged again in a few days for another full month!” problem.