I have written a Twitter thread to explain to others , both creators and patrons alike, why this is a bad idea, but I’ll summarise here, likely repeating a lot of the points others have made in this thread:
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Many creators plan rewards based on patrons being billed at the beginning of each month. For many, this allows them to quickly vet, identify, and withhold rewards for those who have not paid for that month yet as a safety precaution.
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One of the things I do like to do out of courtesy is inform patrons if their payment method is declined. This is only really tenable with all the payments coming in at once, and so it’s easy to pick out declined payments and message.
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Distributing payments all across a month would make accounting difficult, not just for creators who work with a single lump sum but also for patrons as well. A dozen individual pledges get consolidated into a single amount billed at the beginning of the month rather than staying seperate. If the payment method has a fee applied, staggered billing means that less money will be given to creators, and in turn discourage many patrons from bothering supporting at all (remember December 2017?)
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Somewhat related to the last point, but it complicates being both a patron and a creator. Monthly billing means that my support to other creators is taken cleanly as a cut out of my income. With staggered “anniversary” billing it becomes difficult to keep track. If I withdraw my money one day early, does that mean Patreon just charges my card or declines my patronage? Is that just another bit of complication I have to deal with?
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Many creators base their monthly output goals on their pledge amount for the month. This is especially important as many creators do not make a living via Patreon, and so must balance Patreon obligations with, say, any day jobs they may have. Spreading pledges across multiple days in a month makes it much harder to track patronage and lends itself to being far more unpredictable.
If I’m honest, though, the bigger problem is that the issue that anniversary billing is trying to solve not even an issue to begin with, because “double billing” is exactly what the system is designed to do.
As far as I understand it, the issue stems from a patron pledging to an upfront-payment patron. They pledge on, say, the 29th; then only a couple of days later they get charged again.
However, as I remember it, the upfront payment system was designed to do two things:
- Allow patrons to properly compensate creators for an entire backlog of posts
- Prevent patrons from sampling patron-only content by pledging and then pulling their pledge before the monthly amount is due.
I’m not making these up, by the way, this is what Patreon says on its own FAQ page about upfront billing, explicitly stating that upfront billing prevents patrons from sampling patron-only content and also says it’s “great” for people who already have a large catalogue of past content.
So it’s not “double-billing”, because the first charge is explicitly supposed to be the entry cost to access the back catalogue of content. The later charge is a standard monthly fee for the new content. The two charges are not for the same thing; the first charge is supposed to be an initial admission fee on top of the next month’s bill.
What baffles me so much is how Patreon manages to not understand a system it designed itself. It’s not “double-billing”, it’s an admission fee; why the hell do you not understand your own product? And if you do understand it, why have you been so ineffectual at explaining this to any patron (who are your users, by the way) that a seemingly huge chunk of think they’re being charged twice?
If anything, the problem is that Patreon does not seem to take any effort in communicating absolutely anything to anyone. Not just in updates, this one and others in the past that have adversely affected smaller creators, but even in basic site functionality. “The upfront charge is for access to the back catalogue.” What is so difficult to communicate to people who use your website?
Furthermore the fact that I even have to write this out amidst the outcry is indicative of a lack of willingness to communicate at all to us. Creators continue to bear the bulk of the burden of explaining how the damned site works to our fans and every single change that’s proposed that upends everything to place it on its side. We have to continually explain what upfront charging is and why we’re implementing it, or what a “benefit” is, or how to add their postal address to their damn account for receiving rewards.
It is honestly absurd how much Patreon expects us to have to explain to our patrons how to work the thing; sure, we are the creators, but this is YOUR website, and they ARE ALSO your users. Users cancelling their pledges because they think they’re being double billed is telling to me that Patreon is just utterly incompetent or unwilling to understand their own product, let alone communicate to their own users on what the hell is even going on. The fact that this isn’t even the first time Patreon has poorly communicated any change to its creators and relying on creators yelling at you to tell you what a bad idea it is unacceptable and unprofessional. I sometimes have no idea what the hell I pay Patreon’s fees for.
Implement features, solve real problems, allow us more flexibility and patronage and unlocking content, hire someone who can fix the atrocious website user interface, communicate with both your creators and patrons better, cut the crap, and do better.
