Important Announcement

Charge Upfront now Enabled

If you already know how this works, you can go ahead and skip this section.

This change only affects new patrons or patrons that change the amount they pledge.

From now on, new patrons will be charged immediately after making their pledge. Subsequent billing will occur at the first of each month as it normally does. I would advise making your initial pledge at the beginning of the month rather than the end, to get the most value out of it. 

Existing patrons who increases their pledge amount will be automatically billed the difference. For more information on the matter you can check out the entry on the Patreon FAQ here.

I've been waiting for this feature to become available to me for a long time. Some of you might remember the issues I've had with content scrapers. Bot accounts would pledge to my Patreon to steal my content, only for their payment to bounce once the billing cycle came around. Human content scrapers were also quite prevalent. Many people would pledge, download all the content they wanted, and un-pledge right before the billing cycle. Some of them would even vote in polls which isn't fair to legitimate patrons who payed for the privilege.

The charge-upfront system would be able to tackle both of these issues passively. A bot account's payment will always bounce, so they wouldn't be able to access any content while a human content scraper would at the very least pay once to access any content.

Campaign will resume July 31st

My Patreon will only be on hiatus for the month of July. You will not be charged for that month. You can use that time to reflect on the changes I'm making to the campaign and see if you want to continue your pledge.

Here's a preview of the new tier system that will go into effect in August.

Allow me to explain my justification for the biggest changes;

3 Monthly Fanarts   ---------->   1 Monthly Fanart

As I've explained in a previous post, some months can be much busier than others. When I am pressured to meet a deadline, I tend to make more mistakes. As a result, I spend more time correcting these mistakes. My morale also begins to dip when I spend an excessive amount of time on a single piece.

Having a more flexible schedule takes much of the pressure off of me. In turn, I work much more efficiently and produce better quality work. Reducing the number of required monthly fanarts does NOT mean you will be seeing less work from me. It just means I will have a clearer head while I work. I recall my most industrious time being the month prior to the launch of my Patreon (11/8/17 - 12/9/17). I had produced 9 colored pieces in 31 days (all while preparing for and taking my final exams). I'd like to raise my current output (5-6 works per month) back to comparable levels.

Pay What You Want    ---------->   $1, $5, $10 tiers

This change was out of necessity. If I want to be able to do Art full-time, I need to at least have an income I could subsist off of. As such, I needed to provide incentives for people to pledge more than the minimum amount. The Pay What You Want model was not providing substantial growth and would be unsustainable in the long run.

I completely understand if some of you are discontent with the changes. This is why I decided to share this with you all early so you have ample time to decide whether or not you'd like to stay after these changes go into effect.

If you have any questions regarding these changes, feel free to ask. 

Thank you,

Kazu

P.S. I haven't forgotten about this months fanarts! I've been steadily working on them. I've been spending a lot of time drafting Ichigo since I wasn't satisfied with the initial sketches I made for her. Conversely, the Mio sketch is coming along fine, I should have it up later today.