thanks for fucking us, patreon. this didnt even take a week.
e: sincerely hope everyone sinks this in the trial phase. as a per-post creator who focuses and reaches out to small donors…??? how the hell does this do anything but completely screw me?
i just find it absolutely HILARIOUS (infuriating) that just a week or so ago, jack was on discord calling us all “rockstars”, telling us our voices are being heard, promising that the team will communicate better then you go and pull THIS shit. creators having to find out about anniversary billing on TWITTER. and you just conveniently leaving out important updates in your blog posts. and doing the exact opposite of what any of us have asked for. real fucking funny. this website is a joke.
if one patron supports multiple people, are you going to charge them individually based on anniversary date they signed with each individual creator instead of bundling all their payments into one? how is this not going to piss them off?
As a patron of quite a few other creators this sounds like absolute garbage. I don’t want to be charged random amounts all throughout the month. I want the one single charge that i can keep track of
The only way this makes sense if if Patreon is looking at it from a marketing pov. People are less likely to notice a small charge coming out regularly than a large one. People are more likely to forget their subscribed to a monthly charge if it’s small so they will forget to cancel because they don’t notice it going out. So this helps ‘retention’ and gets Patreon more money in processing fees.
As a creator this destroys both of my patreons as there would be no good way to actually give out physical rewards. The only ‘good’ I see out of this would be for Creators who use Patreon’s merch distribution feature and then it’s just another scheme to get Patreon more of Creators money rather than making it easier for Creators to make money. Creators who handle the distribution of physical rewards themselves would be forced to change their work flow entirely based on when people’s payments went through.
patreon truly, as a whole, might have the worst and most inexplicable business instincts ive ever seen. this move doesnt even benefit you guys in any meaningful way. youre just wildly flailing superstitiously at a non-problem and made everyone mad in the process. im baffled.
I want to know why, even though I’ve been here since 2015, I never get a say in these polls you supposedly send out. I only believe they exist because creators I look up to and trust talk about voting in them. Otherwise, I would just assume it’s a lie, because every time you do something like this anniversary billing fiasco, the majority of us are shocked and angry, and then you act shocked that we’re shocked and angry.
Anyway, don’t do anniversary billing. You already know why you shouldn’t. Please try to start off this year without arbitrarily hurting us.
BTW very extremely evil of you to force this on pay-up-front Patreons, who aren’t allowed to switch back to monthly billing. Cool job! You guys are heartless.
i was polled on anniversary billing and responded with an overwhelming “NO THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA”. as well as quite a handful of other creators who do not want this feature. and yet here we are
Any idea when these extra payment processing fees are happening? I couldn’t see from the post at the top.
I am right now, building my own membership site and will be moving away from Patreon in the next couple of months. It’s going to be great to be in control of it, even though it is a lot of work initially to set up. Just infuriated by this ‘happy patrons’ thing when it should be making it great for US as creators. Deeply infuriating. I will have been with Patreon for 5 years next month.
It has been great to grow my membership but they seem to endlessly ignore all requests (at least on here) from creators. Rockstars are we? Lots of talk and no action IMO!
Anniversary billing is a terrible idea, and one more example of Patreon not listening to Creators.
What do you think this is going to do to Patrons who have their billing worked out in their finances? They’re used to getting charged on the 1st! if you randomly start charging people on their signup day, it’s going to screw them!
Think of the patrons, since we all know you don’t give a hang about us creators.
i know im posting a lot but its incredibly concerning and insane that patreon either does not have anyone on the team to point out these incredibly obvious problems that pop up in the genuinely terrible ideas they come up with or the company is structured so that any criticism or critique dies before it leaves anyone’s lips. like what the hell is going on over there.
I’m relatively new to here and a very small creator at the moment but the anniversary billing absolutely feels like a total misstep. As someone above suggested please make this an optional feature, at least initially so some data could be gathered about who opts in at both the creator and patron levels.
But frankly, given what I’ve been reading this seems highly unlikely. The only upside to being new and small is that it’s pretty easy to pull up stakes and move somewhere else.
It was also pointed out to me by a patron that the first of the month billing was implemented because patrons wanted it. So they asked for first of the month billing … and now they suddenly want it the other way?
Adding my voice to the backlash here. This just feels like trying the payment unbundling debacle from a few years ago all over again. I’m in the set of creators that have alternative options to Patreon (even if I don’t like them) and the alternatives are better than they were back then.
Count me in as not in favour of anniversary billing, both as a creator and a patron. If and when this is rolled out I would very much like the option to opt out to be available to both creators and patrons.
wow this is…a terrible idea. like, truly stupid, because while this is a pretty apparent scheme (? or just a really bad move) to get more money this would only result in…less money. because people would bail with such a flaky model, and rightly so. they’d lose creators, lose supporters, lose-lose all the way. man.
Hey everyone, they’re lying to me on twitter right now. Here’s an interesting thread. If you did the poll, I’d appreciate a response to this huge fucking lie they told me!
Edit: They have since apologized and called this a “mistweet.” Fascinating!
here 