Please read! - Here's the game plan going forward

Hey folks, how's it going? Hope you're all having fun and staying safe during the holidays, even if you don't celebrate them. I've been making some decent progress in terms of the whole mental health thing thanks to the help of a couple amazing friends, so hopefully I can keep this art thing going in some sort of constructive direction going forward. That said, I've got more than a few things to say, so I'll try to keep this as condensed as possible.

The summary of where I'm at right now is that my Patreon page is quite literally locked into my currently selected billing options at the moment, newcomers are charged up-front for their chosen pledge amount and everyone is charged reccuringly on the first week of every month while you're subscribed. Patreon mentions that charge up-front is permanent when you opt-in (which is annoying, but clear wording), but it makes no mention of locking you into other options such as charging your supporters per-month or per-post. To make matters more confusing, there's an option to unpublish your page (essentially, it makes it so that nobody can give you money until you republish), but even that doesn't allow you to change your billing options.

I messaged their support people last month to explain this, as well as the fact that that all their help pages say I'd lose my early-adopter Founder status even if I unpublished my page. They basically said "yeah, the only way you could change your billing method would be to make an entirely new account and just lose all your current benefits. We understand that's not a great way to do things though, we should probably look into that".

Kinda really sucks when all I wanna do is switch to the per-post billing option so I don't have to stress over needing to make a post every single month, yeah?

So, my options basically boil down to:

• A) Resume my billing cycle and try to keep up with monthly art
• B) Keep my page paused and wait to see if Patreon announces changes to their billing options
• C) Just delete my account and eventually move to another platform

To give it to y'all straight: I don't know when Patreon would even make these changes (if at all) and I don't want to throw my page in the trash, but I will if I have no other option because I know I can't keep up with monthly art for the foreseeable future. These last couple years have been pretty damn rough and I honestly just need to maintain a much slower pace. I'm sorry that's the case, but I hope you can all understand that.

So, my current plan is this: 

• 1) I'm going to keep my Patreon page up and keep my billing cycle paused until further notice (I'll probably make monthly reminder posts just for clarity's sake). New patrons will still be charged for their chosen pledge amount because I cannot change this, as mentioned earlier in this post. Existing patrons will not be charged at the start of each month.
• 2) I will keep my page this way for maybe another 2-3 months just to wait and see if Patreon actually announces plans to change their restrictive billing options
• 3) If Patreon does make those changes, then I'll keep you all informed and update my page accordingly to keep things running. If they don't, then I'll still keep you all informed and shut down my page when the time comes
• 4) In the meantime, I'm going to continue working on my mental health and start working on art projects that mean a little more to me than the standard pin-up stuff I usually do. I want to focus a lot more on my OCs and potentially create some kind of ongoing comic (and animations) which explores topics that are important to me such as mental health, the struggles of being an adult, the complexity of relationships, and of course, both the fun and uncertainty that comes with exploring one's sexuality. That's not to say I won't ever draw pin-ups or fanart again, I'd just prefer to focus on other things for now.

Hopefully y'all made it this far, sorry if it was a little bit too much reading, but this has been my brain for at least the last 6 months, so there's a lot to unpack, lol. I'm sorry this has all been such a mess too, I've tried my best to juggle it all over the last 6 years and make sure you're all getting your money's worth whenever I have been active, as well as compensate you all with free content during times when I have slipped up. Not exactly ideal business practice and I sincerely apologize, but I hope it's at least come across as genuine effort to make things right when necessary.

Going forward, I hope I can eventually find better options for the money side of things, like creating and uploading art at my own pace and only charging when I deem it appropriate. I'd much rather put out quality work over stressing to meet a monthly quota.

Y'all can stick around and I'll still upload higher resolution pics here as a little bonus, but if you wanna leave now just for the sake of guaranteeing you're not spending unnecessary money (which shouldn't be an issue), then I totally understand. You'll still get to see all my uploads on my public pages, nothing will be paywalled here.

As I said, I'll keep y'all updated over the next few months and my billing cycle will be paused until further noticed (January is already paused as of this post). Thanks for all your support over the years, talk to you again soon.