Patreon, Apple, and subscription news

Hey so I'm sure folks are probably going to be hearing about this most of today either from other creators or Patreon itself, but some changes to patreon are going to be going through in November due to requirements from the Apple store. Long story short they require all billing on Patreon to be done as a subscription service rather than monthly billing in addition to requiring a 30% cut for usage on the Apple IOS store.

As you can probably guess this causes quite a few problems for a lot of creators and Patreon.

So what does that mean for this Patreon? In terms of the subscription I've been sort of wanting to switch away from the monthly billing for a bit so that people can hop on at any time and not worry about getting reduced access near the end/start of a month. So at the end of August I'll be switching to that since Patreon is going to be forcing it anyways in November.

As for the 30% charge for any folks who use the Apple store for Patreon, well that becomes a bit more murky. Patreon is giving creators the ability to either eat the cost themselves or to instead add it as part of the charge for people using Patreon through the apple service. I have to see how Patreon ends up implementing this, but chances are it's probably going to be charge on patreon for any apple users. It just ultimately is something that sucks a lot, but I really can't see any way around it. Taking a 30% cut out of a patreon pledge in addition to the normal fees and charges just because it's being used on Apple is a bit insane.

So I'm probably gonna recommend most patrons and followers on here to try and step away from Apple as their Patreon App if they do use it. I'd say the majority of Patreons are going to all become 30% more expensive overnight in November specifically when being used through the IOS store. With Patreon available online or with web based systems, it is probably in most peoples best interest to try and use it off Apple as a platform.

Just overall this is something that really sucks to see as it forces the hands of so many creators in a way that they don't want.

TLDR: I will be switching to subscription billing rather than monthly billing on August 30th to align with Patreons requirements from Apple.