It hasn’t before, but I just lost a patron today, so it looks like actually charging them is detrimental to my trajectory. And I’ve just lost the one so far - I’m lucky compared to some other people in this thread alone, and tons more on Twitter.
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This update does not clarify HOW you arrived at the idea that it would be a good idea to charge a $0.35 fee PER PLEDGE and how that obviously hurts people who want to pledge a little to a lot of different creators!!!
The intended goal of consolidating the different systems is a good one but a PER PLEDGE FLAT FEE is a TERRIBLE idea, and that is what we are all upset about, and all you say about that is “We spent nearly a year reviewing the numbers and running experiments” - Is that really all you have to say?
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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?
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This 35 cent fee never showed up for me when i pledge to new people since then. It only showed me what i was pledging for, which was usually $1 in most cases. It never showed a fee to me. 
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Looking at the graph, July was a HUGE drop for me, and I lost nearly 25% of my income.
And here I thought I was doing something wrong that pissed a whole pile of people off. Seems I was wrong, and then made changes to try and offset the bleeding out of Patrons I experienced.
I’ve also lost a $1 Patron today as a result of this decision. I might be losing more, and from my higher pledges as well. A few Patrons are pretty concerned, and aren’t happy at all about the changes.
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What I’m wondering is, why do you need a subscription that renews on the day of signup? That’s not how Patreon works right now. Nearly every monthly creator I know has monthly content, and plans accordingly. With the payment up front system, if someone pledges two days before the end of a month, they get that month’s content; and two days later, they get the next month’s content. They still get what they paid for.
As a creator, I don’t mind losing out on a bigger chunk of the first $1 someone pays (because it gets bigger fees since it’s a stand-alone payment) if it means every other $1 they give me at the end of every following month will give me a bigger cut since their payments will be aggregated together. That still lets you use patreon earnings to pay for the patrons that creators are supporting. It doesn’t lead to more headaches; you folks keep the monthly schedule that so many creators use and that Patreon is known for.
Why is a recurring fee on the monthly anniversary of your first payment so important? It’s causing so many problems and backlash; why not just keep the monthly format, and just apply this fee change to the first payment a patron makes to a new creator? Wouldn’t that be closer to your current format and result in fewer headaches for everyone?
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It was showing it to me so maybe I was in a beta and didn’t know. 
I’d like to say that must be why I’ve had zero new patrons this year, but there are probably a lot of other variables at work there.
One of Patreons competitors had it right:
Prorate payments, upfront, on those who pledge later in the month so they can see the content that has been posted. They also have the option of an extra fee (at the creators discretion) to see previous works. Then full payment the next month, so if they ordered custom stuff, that full payment would grant them access to the custom order for that tier. Really, i don’t see why these features are so hard. They’ve been talked about so much here from the creators that it’s mind boggling why they cannot seem to be included in the plans. Why can’t those ideas be tested? 
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It’s totally possible. If you were, that’s unfortunate that you weren’t aware D:
Yeah i had a few new people pledge during Inktober but otherwise, i’ve lost a bunch this year. I haven’t looked at the specific info in my admin panel though other than a few exit surveys from earlier in the year (however many people don’t leave info on the exit surveys for me and i have no idea who they were left by because there is no names on them.)
I wouldn’t think it would affect those already there as I didn’t see it on people I was already pledging, only the people I was considering pledging. Temrin said she didn’t see it so I think it may have only been temporary or maybe only showed up for a few people. I don’t know. I’m just curious if this has been affecting people before this announcement, maybe since the testing began.
I really appreciate the explanation. It makes more sense now, since I remember discussions about the change in pay schedule at PatreCon. But it would have saved so much confusion and prevented a lot of ill will to say right from the start that the change in fees was to accommodate the change to upfront pay+pledge anniversary pay dates. Transparency is so important when money is involved.
I have my own issues with the idea of people being charged on their pledge anniversary. It may complicate the way I deliver rewards, since I offer some snail mail rewards. And it’s still hard to stomach that patrons will have to foot the bill for all the fees. But the extra info helps.
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I just adjusted my tiers to compensate for the fees. 2 dollars becomes 1.50 (which adjusts to 1.89 or 1.90), 5 dollars becomes 4.50 (adjusts to 4.98), and 20 dollars becomes 19 (adjusts to 19.90). Let’s see if this goes over alright.
EDIT: exactly 15 minutes after I posted, one person changed from 5 to 4.50. It begins.
I can’t even edit my tiers right now. I’ve sent in a help ticket a few days ago and nothing. Probably got lost in the amount of help requests they are getting for this change.
I’m really not sure if i can realistically reduce everything to compensate. I put a lot of thought into my prices. But i hope it works for you!
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Well…okay, my wording was poor. You can’t edit tiers. What I did was create tiers identical to the ones that I already had, but with lower prices, and then suggest that my patrons opt for those.
Also, thank you very much!
I cant even do that right now XD I try to make a new tier and it wont save. I try to unpublish tiers and it wont do it. So frustrating when i want to do something about my project right now but i cannot. Hrrrrnggg
You know, someone I’ve been talking to on Skype said that his “create new tier” option has been grayed out. I really don’t get it. Maybe the site’s borking from traffic? I hope that that’s the case. While it may be unresolvable now, it could just go away after some time.
Here’s hoping!
@Temrin, this is so breathtakingly simple that this whole fiasco looks even worse. 
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Right? 
I’m pitching in to voice my concerns too.
I’m a very small creator, I net about $150 a month, and a huge chunk of that comes from $1 tier Patrons.
Why are they contributing $1? Because it’s cheap. If you add another 40% to their fee, then it’s no longer cheap, and most importantly they’re going to feel like they’ve been scammed when they pledge one dollar, and see $1.35 is gone from their accounts.
Let’s say that someone supports a hundred creators at $1 or a similarly low amount, how many of those pledges is he going to be forced to drop because the extra fees send him wildly over budget?
Please just let creators pay the extra fees. I don’t care if I get a lower percentage of the pledges, because the alternative right now is losing pretty much all of it, and then neither I nor Patreon gets paid at all.
To reiterate, it’s absolutely absurd to charge people more for pledging less, which is essentially what this change will do.
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