Questions about creator fees

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Hi there! I have in mind certain project and I will likely open a Patreon for it in the future. So, I have created a dummy page just for testing, I’ve been messing around with the Tier editor among other features. Just to get familiar with it so hopefully I won’t mess it up for the real thing.

Sorry for the slightly long introduction, I just wanted to give some context. Now, going to the main topic, I’ve been reading this help article about creator fees, but I have some doubts about how and when are those fees calculated.

Let’s say for example I receive a 10 USD pledge from a patron, if I understood correctly, there are two fees before any money gets into my balance: the platform fee, which would be 8% for the Pro plan, and the payment processing fee, which would 3.9% + 30 cents (since I’m not a US resident there’s that extra 1%). Are both percentages calculated using the full pledge amount as a base? Or maybe the payment processing fee is subtracted first and then the platform fee is applied on that amount?

With the first case the platform fee would be 10 x 0.08 = $0.80 and the payment fee would be 10 x 0.039 + 0.30 = $0.69 which would account for a total of $1.49.

However, with the second case the payment fee is the same, but if we apply the platform fee on the resulting amount 10 - 0.69 = $9.31 -> 9.31 x 0.08 = 0.7448 (I assume this would be rounded to $0.74). It’s just a slight difference, but with larger amounts and more patrons the difference may be noticeable. I’m making some estimations to calculate how many patrons I would need to gain X and I would like to be as much accurate as possible.

Let’s consider another case scenario with VAT added on top of the tier price, with a VAT of 21% the actual pledge amount would be $12.10. Will that amount be used to calculate the payment processing fee? And how about the platform fee, would it be applied using the base tier price ($10) or the actual amount charged to the patron?

Lastly, regarding the currency conversion fee if the patron decides to pay in their local currency. How it affects the other fees mentioned before? Which would be the base amount to calculate the 2.5% conversion fee?

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Hey @Sigma91, thanks for reaching out with some really thoughtful questions! Fees are a little hard to estimate when your Patreon page is new, since you don’t know how much you’ll make. But here’s some helpful I gathered from the support team:

  • The platform fee is taken from their total earnings of the month (ie. if I make $100 in September and have 8% from the Pro plan - platform fees would add up to be $8) but for payment processing fees, the total amount for this is not based off of the $100, since this fluctuates per patron transaction, there is not a base taken from.
  • VAT included fees are handled similarly as above
  • Currency conversion doesn’t really affect the other fees — the only difference is that creators are charged an extra 2.5% per transaction that is made outside of their currency. Base amount taken would be the patron’s membership amount.

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions or concerns. Always happy to help :slight_smile:

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Hi @reyna thank you for the info. I still have one doubt regarding the payment processing fees. Which are those factors that make it fluctuate? Is the country of the patron a factor that affects the effective rate?

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Great question @Sigma91. Payment processing fees are applied per patron transaction. So if a creator gets more patrons in a month than a previous month, the processing fee will be higher and vice versa if they those patrons. Payment fees are not like the platform fee where the amount is from a fixed percentage. I know it’s a little confusing but I hope that makes sense!

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Hi @reyna , is this any way to reduce these fees? I got about $66.50/month cut which means about 10% cut out of my earning before fees. This is a huge amount of cut that feels too much for me as a small creator.

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