A New Year, A New Change to Drawabox's Critique Tiers

For those of you who don't have time to read this whole post, here's a summary of the changes:

• The new critique tier pricing outlined below will apply to all new pledges as of February 1st. Those who had pledged prior to that date will be subject to the new pricing as of March 1st, allowing for a smoother transition. I repeat: If you're already pledged, the price changes will not affect you until March 1st.
• Critique tiers are changing to $5/month for Lessons 1+2 and the Box Challenge, $10/month for Lessons 3-7 and all other challenges.
• Lesson 1 and Box Challenge critiques will be handled by teaching assistants to help reduce my workload, but if you insist on having those early lessons critiqued by me, $7+/month pledges will be guaranteed to have their work reviewed by me personally.
• Multiple submissions in a given month are still allowed, but you must wait at least 2 weeks between submissions (not including cases where you've been asked to redo part of a lesson you've already submitted).

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To start, I want to say how glad I am at the response to the update to the website. Over the months it took, I wasn't ever entirely certain that investing that time and effort was entirely worth it, but the inundation of appreciation validated every little bit of it. The videos definitely need to be updated with better audio and production value, but getting the content out by December 25th was my priority.

Anyway! With all these changes has come a pretty significant inundation of work. Prior to this month, I was getting around 2 submissions per day on average. Through this month, I've been getting closer to 4 per day (about 4.3/day since the 15th), with peaks as high as 8 submissions in a day. Basically what I mean to say is that the jump in growth has been considerable, but the way things are now isn't really doesn't scale well as the community grows.

Adding to the growth is also the fact that students frequently submit multiple times a month. This is allowed, but somewhat restricted and has never really had clear terms on what those limitations are to be. I've basically been telling students when I've felt they were submitting too often to hold onto their work until the next month.

The intent I've always had is to gradually increase prices to deal with demand, but it's not something I'm eager to do, because it's a bandaid solution. I am after all just one man, and there are only so many hours in the day (especially while I'm still balancing a full time job, drawing a web comic, etc). About a year ago, I shuffled the patreon tiers around a bit and it did give me some relief, but I think we need to find a different solution.

So here's what's going to happen, as of February 1st:

• In the interest of improving Drawabox's scalability, I've chosen a few of my students (most of whom serve as admins/mods on the discord server) to serve as teaching assistants, and handle critiques for Lesson 1 and the 250 Box Challenge. Each of them are further along with the lessons, and they have been instructed in what to look for in those submissions in order to give a helpful critique. One day I would like to extend TAs to more of the lessons, but for now they are limited ONLY to Lesson 1 and the 250 Box Challenge.
• They are going to be paid per critique - while some have offered to work for free, I have never been comfortable with offering anything short of fair compensation when it comes to labour that generates revenue.
• The patreon tiers will be adjusted, both to allow for the critique pricing to be fair to these teaching assistants, as well as to balance the time I spend in some of the later critiques against the prices of those tiers.
• To clarify the multiple-submissions-per-month issue, the tier prices are based on what I consider to be fair for the amount of time I put into one critique of that tier (sort of - I usually lowball myself and end up putting in vastly more time, but it's a start). At the same time, I will continue to allow multiple submissions in a month, but submissions must be made 2 weeks apart (not including cases where I ask students to resubmit parts of a lesson).

As for the prices, these will be the new tiers:

• Tier 1: $5/month, includes Lesson 1, 2 and the 250 Box Challenge.
• If you insist on having your lesson 1 and box challenges critiqued by me specifically, then those at the $7/month tier will always get feedback from me. Keep in mind that lesson 1 and the 250 box challenge are highly structured and the critiques you receive from a TA or from me won't be particularly different. Also, any submission critiqued by a TA will be reviewed by me before I assign the completion badge on reddit, so in the odd chance something was missed, I will catch it.
• Tier 2: $10/month, includes Lesson 3-7 and all other challenges.

In order to make the transition as smooth as possible, if you pledged at the $3 tier in January, you will continue to be eligible for Tier 1 through all of February. New pledges will be subject to the new tiers after February 1st, and pledges made before that will be subject to them starting March 1st.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to post them below. My long term hope is that I can develop Drawabox to be less reliant on me specifically, with a variety of trusted teachers available at different price points, each given the opportunity to build up their own reputations as they further their careers, while also giving students access to cheaper, reliable instruction that falls well below the hundreds of dollars one might spend on other online courses.