THANK YOU. Explanations are amazing.
My thoughts on where you guys are headed
To do that, we need to move our payments system to treat your pledges like any other subscription service. In other words, we need a system that charges patrons at the time of their initial pledge, and on the anniversary of their pledge each month thereafter.
Oh god. So we’re moving away from monthly? For good? Great. Another reason for me to start looking elsewhere for funding. I work on a monthly bases for MANY reasons and having things come ut at once, all at the same time saves me a LOT of grief. I know what i’m getting into for the month, right from the get go and can plan my work accordingly. This makes it so incredibly easy for me to use your service and eliminates a lot of issues and stress around it. Changing this is going to force me off this platform because now it is absolutely no different than taking commissions straight up again. I can’t send out rewards to all people of a support tier at once anymore. I’ll have to waste more time looking at who pays when so i can send them their content, let alone if someone pledges in the middle or end of the month, i’m not screwed for time to complete their content if it is a custom piece.
That’s a lot of fees for creators to pay. We had three options:
Have creators deal with a huge increase in fees
Have Patreon eat the cost of the new fees (which is financially impossible given our current rate of 5%)
Add a service fee so Patreon can cover the third party fees
Thank you for actually admitting that you guys needed more money.
So, we chose to pursue option three, and spent nearly a year reviewing the numbers and running experiments to make sure the end result was creators either make more money, or keep their current earnings.
Uhm. Okay so was it months or a year? Why did we, on a creator forum that is meant for feedback, NOT have more input on this? This is incredibly mind bowing. It seems it was mentioned kind of here before (or so I’m told) but it wasn’t ever pushed or pinned or in our faces.
I am still curious how you are going to get around the fact that your payment processing companies do NOT allow businesses to charge a fee to the buyers for a business transaction?