Another Update

Wow.  So...  Shit continues to be a mess, as you can all likely tell from the lack of anything in several months.

I'm really making an effort to get things moving again, some of the complications have started calming down, etc etc.  But I think going forward I need to simplify things a bit.

To start with, some of you are likely aware that Patreon made some changes to funding recently.  I'm a bit out of touch but here's my general understanding.

Up till now, when you contributed $1, 5% went to Patreon as a service fee, then a processing charge (financial services, credit card processing, etc) came off of that, and I would get somewhere around 80-90 cents out of the dollar.  It varied month to month.

Going forward, Patreon has changed this and pushed the processing fee from the creator, on to the Patrons.  Before you complain to me I have no control over this.  It's not something I can turn off or on.

So now instead of you putting in $1 and me getting 80-90 cents, your contribution gets padded by the processing fee, adding 3% (2.9 actually but whatever) +35 cents.  It's that 35 cents that's the kicker.

So on my end, when you put in money, now instead of a variable amount between 80-90 cents per dollar, I now get 95 cents every time.  On Your end, instead of paying $1, you are now paying $1.03/dollar... +35 cents.

Sooo.  As you can see, this makes a $1 donation a shitty shitty deal for you.  You end up paying $1.40, a 40% bump, while a $5 donation goes to 5.50, a 10% increase, $20 becomes $21, a 5%... you get the idea.

So, to start with, to try to deal with this I'm dropping the $1 tier entirely.  There were only a few people using it, and the rewards amounted to next to nothing.  This will stop encouraging people to waste money on processing fees, and make things simpler for me, since the $1 folks were the only ones without access to the "exclusive" galleries, I won't need to track which is which anymore, and can just post 1 gallery.

Secondly, I think I need to eliminate the custom picture rewards.   >_<

This is a big bummer for me, as I like doing them, but they also consume way more than their share of time, and complicate things a great deal.  I also realize I might end up losing a lot of money as a result, as like 30% of the donations come from the few people using those reward tiers, but I have to balance that against the whole "Not actually producing anything" problem.  And 30% of 0 is 0.

This of course leaves a void in those reward tiers.  And I'm not really sure what to replace them with =/  I'd really appreciate your ideas on what you would be interested in.

None of this is of Any immediate concern to you.  For one thing I haven't made the changes yet, and also since the charges only go out when I finish a set, you have at least a few weeks to make whatever changes to your patronage you need to.  Please let me know your feelings on all this, any thoughts you have on what I could offer for the reward tiers, or just random musings.  I always like to hear from you guys.