Good question and an oversight in the FAQs. We’ve just updated this for everyone. And yes, in the short-term it does mean that you’ll be paying more out of your existing account to support these other creators.
As a creator, this means this pledges that come from your existing account balance will see a service fee applied during the next billing cycle, January 1st, 2018.
We will likely be changing the way creator to creator payments happen in the future so that you will no longer be able to use your Patreon balance. One reason is that it causes many edge cases that add complexity to our payments system as work to roll out charge upfront over the course of 2018.
After all this time, the thing you finally come back to the thread to comment on is not about any of the complaints that make up 99% of this thread, but to confirm that yes, Patreon will in fact be double dipping by taking payments to us that have been had processing fees added to them, and making us pay processing fees to help fund other creators? Really? This is the thing you came back for - to add more fuel to the rage fire?
You guys need to get more staff over here to address things. All the skipped questions and concerns… It is really troublesome. I realize you guys are dealing with an increased “help desk” need right now but holy moly.
If you’re no longer letting us use our Patreon balance to support fellow creators, that’s definitely going to harm us and mean less money in our pockets, which goes against the stated goal of this update. I understand there are some edge cases, but the money’s already in your hands at this point—why require us to re-process additional payments that are going to rack up more fees?
This really feels like Patreon is doing all of this just to make more money in fees. If the company was upfront about needing the money, at least it’d be a much less bitter pill to swallow, but there’s plenty of evidence here, on social media, and on news sites that the community at large, both creators and patrons, are being hurt by this change. So keeping up the pretense that this change is to put more money in creators’ pockets feels dishonest.
Please reconsider this decision. Look at all the posts in this thread alone showing how many creators are hemorrhaging patrons; it’s clearly putting the livelihood of a ton of folks at risk and eroding the goodwill folks have toward the company. There’s still time to make this right.
I won’t mince words with my patrons. They come first, and I will not give up one iota of their goodwill so Patreon can make more money. But you have now lost goodwill from us and them simultaneously.
You’re on your own defending this, we will not help. In fact, I intend to make it very clear that we very much protest this change, and that the branding of it is highly dishonest.
If this inane project really goes through, then maybe everyone should just tell their patrons to donate directly via PayPal. That way, donations can continue to happen without fees that make everyone angry. VAT is bad enough, but now Patreon is screwing over international patrons even more, and charging multiple times for each pledge despite monthly bills coming in one lump sum.
No, seriously: I saw on Twitter and in this thread that Patreon has been working with content creators and with patrons “for months.” Where has a single positive response been? I haven’t seen one. Not any. And if people knew about this plan months ago, then how come it didn’t go viral back then like it did the moment we received our email about this thing yesterday? Whoever you worked with who had a positive response must have been a rare find, indeed - it really shatters statistics, considering that I’ve seen absolutely nothing but negative responses since yesterday, and people in this thread and elsewhere online are already making posts about how they’ve lost subscribers. Here’s a tip, Patreon: if you want to make more money, then don’t cause your source of income to do business elsewhere. We don’t fund you - the patrons do. And the patrons are choosing to abandon you because of this new decision.
While appreciate the response Carla, you need some help on the damage control. It’s only going to get worse without directly addressing the concerns flooding this forum and social media.
Enough people are pensive about supporting creators on Patreon. This change will make it even more so.
Radio silence for an entire night, only to come back this evening to answer that yes, they’re double dipping when it comes to charging content creators fees if they want to support other content creators.
Shifting the 3% fee to the supporter is… okay, I can see how that makes sense. Putting a $0.35 fee on top of that is not the best, but I can see the reasoning. But making the $0.35 fee PER PLEDGE is terrible. If i have this right, $10 pledged to 1 creator gets a hike of about $0.65, roughly $0.50 of which goes to the creator. But $1 pledged to 10 creators (or $1 per creation pledged to one creator who has 10 monetized posts in one month) gets a hike of about $3.80, while still only $0.50 goes to the creator. How does pledging $1 ten places cost Patreon more in fees than pledging $1 to one place??? This makes no sense!
It seems very clear that this is a move that discourages small patreons (like mine) and discourages people pledging small amounts to lots of people (like I do). I just don’t understand why you would want to discourage that! Unless you’ve changed your goals and want to prioritize large creators and large pledges now. Or worse, you’re just disguising a blatant cash grab with the tagline “more money to creators!”
@carla so to recap, this change punishes low-level donors to multiple creators (the problem Patreon purports to solve in the first place), double-charges transfers from balance until you can eliminate the program (a feature that was meant to reduce fees), angers creators, alienates patrons, and gives Patreon a nice little Q4 bonus?
You don’t have a product. You run a service. Services with no users fail. These changes are driving away users - the proof is all over this thread, not to mention wider social media. My honest question is, how do you see this change increasing or even maintaining your userbase in the face of increasing competition? And if the change doesn’t do either of these things, then why was it put into effect?
I got a 1-dollar pledge today, which really threw me off, as it was today of all days, and with the exception of five days ago, I haven’t gotten a new pledge in quite awhile, and also, it was 1 dollar, when my lowest tier is 2 dollars. If that really is a bot or a fake, then this is scummy and atrocious.
We know creators and patrons want more information about this topic, and we’ve tried to address many of the questions that you’ve raised. We’ve updated the blog post to go one level deeper. Here is more about the decision, from our payments product manager.
You are being listened to, and concerns are being shared internally.
Just so you all know, this is not entirely new. Remember back in July when everyone was so upset about the new logo? At the same time I noticed then that there was a new fee for patrons and asked about it in the “Announcing the new Patreon” thread.
You can tell from my tone that I was a bit freaked out that it was being rolled out without any warning and had some idea of the potential for disaster. I asked about it again several days later, still deeply concerned:
I addressed the issue of patrons making lots of small pledges and being charged a fee for every pledge and that this could cause trust issues with patrons and Patreon as well as patrons and artists, in general. This was the response I got then:
At the time I thought, thank goodness they are testing this now and will find out this is about the worst thing they could ask of our already generous patrons. I feared the level of distrust from patrons and the lack of transparency from Patreon made me more than a little nervous, but we were going to be told well in advance before it happened, right? Besides, no one else seemed to be having the level of anxiety I was to add to the concern so maybe I just needed to calm down and wait and see.
This is not an “I told you so” or anything of that nature. I just want to point out that since July (at least) there was a 35cent fee that was showing up when a patron was initially pledging, but it didn’t actually charge them. I gathered from what I was told that Patreon was using this to assess whether or not patrons would be okay with picking up that fee and that they would be evaluating if it affected numbers.
What I am asking you all to do is to look at your graphs since July-ish and see if your growth was affected to get some idea if this initiative has already been detrimental to your trajectory.
We. Don’t. Want. To charge. Our patrons. Fees. They will leave. Many have left. Everybody is being screwed. We don’t want justification for this terrible decision. We want the decision to be reversed.
wow.
