A taxing update

Hey guys! We got an email from Patreon that said a portion of y'all may see a change in how you're taxed. The changes won't affect everyone and they should be pretty minor (the example they gave is a $5 pledge might go up 22 cents - 55 cents), BUT with your input, we can make sure that y'all aren't being taxed more than you need to be (more details about that at the end).

Some basics: This change will go live July 1st, and it's because they're now being required by new tax laws to apply sales tax/VAT/GST.  Whether or not you're affected depends on 2 things: 1) where you live, 2) what benefits we as creators offer on our patreon. 

The "2" part of that is where things are a little less black and white, and this is where we need input from you guys to make sure you're not taxed too much. Not all benefits are taxable in all states: some states only tax physical goods, but some also tax digital content and exclusive experiences. Patreon will automatically asses our tiers based on keywords to see if we're offering falls into these categories. BUT we can override them if the benefit listed in the tier is only PART of the reason you guys pledge. 

Let's use our $5 tier as an example. Our $5 tier lists the Aftershow as the main reward for that tier. If the ONLY reason you pledge $5 is to watch the Aftershow, that tier would be considered 100% digital content and your pledges would be taxed accordingly if you live in a state that has a tax on digital content. Now, if 50% of the reason you pledge $5 is for the Aftershow, and 50% is simply because you want to support us, then we can override that tier to say it's actually only 50% digital content - and you would be taxed only half as much if you're in a digital-content-taxing state. See what I mean about it not being super black and white?

Since we can't answer for you, might do a poll to see WHY you guys pledge: is it the rewards themselves, or is it just because you want to support us? We can't do the poll til we can access the backend tool to let us override the auto-categorization and see how much control we really have, but we still wanted to give you a heads up that this change is coming AND that we should have some level of control over it. Thanks for hanging in there through this long email guys!