gigglinggoblin

Patreon Restructuring

Added 2017-12-08 03:45:32 +0000 UTC

Hello, my lovelies,. So as some of you might have heard, Patreon has recently decided to roll out some, uh, special changes. They seem determined to eliminate the $1 pledge as an option, and they're leaving it up to us, the creators, to explain it better. I'm not super stoked about this whole change, but here goes.

Essentially, the fees are being shifted from the creators to the patrons. A $1 pledge, before, would have gotten to me as something closer to $0.60 due to fees. Now, it will just cost you around $1.40. The $1 pledge as we know it—a nice cheap option for poorer patrons—is dead. This is part of a pretty jerky move by Patreon to encourage the bigger pledge tiers at our expense.

The change has gotten a lot of flak on Twitter, but, uh, it probably doesn't much matter to Patreon. I'm pretty sure they're just going to wait out our complaints and change nothing. There currently isn't any alternative to Patreon, though some are in the making that I have my eye on. If you want to email Patreon to express your displeasure, by all means, do! I have. Maybe we can still scare them off of this course. I'm just not counting on it.

So, the tl;dr: My $1 pledgers will now be paying close to $1.40 per update. I swear I would set the tier lower if I could, to negate the increased cost to you guys, but $1 is the actual minimum. :(

I will absolutely understand if anyone has to drop out because of all this. Take care of your finances, especially around the holidays! No hard feelings!

EDIT: To be clear, this affects all patrons. Patreon will, as of December 18th, charge patrons a new service fee of 2.9 percent plus 35 cents per pledge. I am considering my options. I might reduce the $2 and $3 pledges correspondingly to at least spare those pledgers the burden.

EDIT: Okay, the assumption that Patreon was doing this for their own profit appears to have been unfair. They're just doing this because they're really dumb. Look, I dunno. I really hope they back down when they see how unpopular it is.