So I noticed an issue on Patreon with unpublishing tiers.
Recently it was recommended that we unpublish our $1 tiers and phase them out and raise our prices, but a user sent me a screenshot letting me know that despite there being no public $1 tier, the system that tells people the lowest tier available to a post doesn’t check to see if the tier it is recommending for access to a post still exists publicly or not.
What I mean is, people are being told they can sub for access to posts for $1 which they actually can’t. This is the image a backer sent us:
But there is no public $1 tier, that tier was unpublished, and backers at higher tiers are being told they can unlock posts for lower pledge amounts. It’s actually confusing people a lot and we have new backers that are trying to incrementally increase their pledge amounts to access posts that they won’t be able to access for anywhere near the listed amount.
We’ve gotten other people messaging that they don’t have access to posts that “are at a lower tier than mine” - because it’s listed as $1 access, but the tier we’re using was unpublished.
Patreon should check to make sure a tier is actually currently available to pledge at before it tells people “they can access this tier for $amount” - this seems like a huge bug or oversight, especially in light of the advice that we should be unpublishing tiers to raise prices.
Hi @Watsup! Anna here from the Creator Success team–I work directly with our 18+ content creators. Thank you so much for posting this. I am so sorry to hear that your patrons are dealing with this confusing situation. I hopped into a new Incognito mode browser session, and did a command-F search for $ on your public page.
I didn’t find any instances of Patreon recommending that I join for $1 to unlock any of your posts; just recommendations to join at any level, $3, $10 and $25. I’m guessing that if there is a bug, it’s only visible to existing patrons.
I’m working with some of the folks on our product and support teams on this for you, so I will get updates your way asap once I have an answer. In the mean time, please reply to this thread if you have any questions, and thank you so much for your patience in the mean time.
No, we had to disable the $1 tier entirely (not just unpublish it) because we were getting an increasing number of new pledges asking us what tier they had to pledge at to access certain posts and wondering why it said they had to pledge $1 but they didn’t have access to it.
There weren’t many people at the tier, so we just dropped it, but we were using it as a “dev tier” so that I didn’t have to pay $25 to access posts as well and I’d love for the bug to be fixed so we can implement that again. If you’d like us to re-enable it so you can see the bug in action, we can, but it’s 100% there.
Just make a new tier at $1, unpublish it, then give that tier access to any posts on a campaign along with a higher tier, it will recommend new people sign up at the lowest tier (even if it’s unpublished).
If you or one of the people from the product team need direct communication to walk through this in real time, I’m in the Patreon community discord and can walk them through it if they’d like.
We just wanted to follow up on the status of this fix!
We have a $1 tier that is both a filled limited tier, and is also unpublished:
However people are seeing that filled, unpublished tier as a pledge option when viewing locked posts:
This is still causing some confusion for our patrons, since they actually need to pledge $10 to access posts like this one. We’ll leave it set up this way for a while so your team has some time to review the issue-- our Patreon page is here: https://www.patreon.com/LittleNapoleon
