Tiers musing

I realised I've got access to tiers now patreon has discontinued the Lite™ plan and moved me to a Founders plan, so I've been musing about making some tiers. Not to gate content, but just like, fun lil prestige titles a la "bee citizen", "bee engineer", "bee scientist", "bee astronaut"— all my works would still go out to all paying supporters.

I like the pay-what-you-want structure, but I've noticed most new patrons have subbed at the default amount (do folks know you can change it?) Patreon sorta obscures that you even can  pay-what-you-want these days, so maybe that era is over. Mby tiers would help new ppl choose the right amt for them?

I've also been interested in a feature where I can gift access to a tier (but I have to have tiers to do it). For a long while I've wished for a way to like, exchange access to patreon content with other artists. While we could just mutually pledge to each other's patreons, we'd both run at a loss giving patreon and a payment provider a cut both ways, so gifting would be a way around that.

For those interested in patreon admin minutiae, I couldn't do tiers until now because I was on a legacy payment structure where everyone gets charged on the 1st of each month. It was a more awkward system for supporters, as you may have experienced if you first pledged close to the end of a month, your next charge would have come unfairly soon. However, by syncing up all the payments into one transaction per user, it resulted in some marginal savings in payment processing fees. If everyone was on 1st of the month billing, it would result in more worthwhile savings, but the structure is legacy now anyway. Personally, I think the best system would be to bill ppl the full amount on sign-up, but then on the next 1st-of-the-month, only bill ppl the pro-rata difference between a full month and the "spill-over" from the first pledge. It's probably too complicated for a user-facing system tho. And incompatible with Apple's frankly anti-competitive control over the iOS market.

Anyway, ur all the best, thanks for your support, and as always please feel free to share any thoughts or opinions you have <3