Upcoming changes issued by Patreon
Added 2017-12-08 02:45:14 +0000 UTCSo Patreon decided to do this:
Starting December 18th, Patreon will apply a new service fee of 2.9% + $0.35 to each of your individual pledges. This service fee helps keep Patreon up and running and standardizes my processing fees to 5%.
I'm not happy about this, I have sent note to Patreon to lodge my dissatisfaction in this change. My note to them is as follows:
I do not think the changes you are planning to implement will benefit Creators or Patrons. Many Patrons are on budgets that are tight and I think doing this will cause undo stress on them. If you do this, and I hope you change your mind and don't, I will drop the my pledge amounts to offset the cost so that my patrons will not have to pay more. I consider the fees and charges as part of doing business and the cost belong solely to me and me alone.
Please reconsider what you are about to do, this is not good business, and you will cause Creators to lose patrons.
Your patronage is very important to me and I do not nor can I afford to lose anyone over this. As many of you know I do work a full time job and this is, bluntly, my second job. If I wasn't able to do this I would be working at Burger King to make ends meet. If Patreon does implement this I will drop the tiers to $48, $19, $9, and $4.
You all mean so much to me and I thank you for letting me do this.
Shane
Comments
I'll stay of course, your art is just too good to not support you :)
Nhala
2017-12-10 12:28:20 +0000 UTCThe big thing here is that they charge these fees per pledge and even per page even though they aren't incurring that cost themselves, so for me that would be ~40 fees leveraged against me monthly but only one actual charge done towards my card. Quick calculation increases my cost by 19.2% when with the actual fee (if we limit it to genuin transaction fees they incur) it should be "only" 2.9%. I would not mind it that much if it was limited to the actual transaction as charged to my card but since they do it for simple database changes I just cannot support it in its current form. Saw that someone said that they lost about 20% of their supporters (almost exclusively $1 tier) and another that they would loose about 38% of their income (compared to old way) with this change then I just can't see this as anything except a money grab from Patreon. Sure that's only 2 data points and some might actually benefit from this but as it stands I can't see how it would be an overall net benefit for most creators. If Patreon is really incurring all those fees then I'd rather they clean that up to minimize them rather than just shifting it onto pledgers which seem get creators a net decrease in income due to dropped pledges.
BlackestDawn
2017-12-08 07:59:53 +0000 UTCI have no issues paying the extra costs. I would never ask you to sacrifice your prices.
Mikey
2017-12-08 06:14:42 +0000 UTCAs with Elberik, I appreciate the thought. When I got the e-mail from Patreon I was quite disappointed with them. This amounts to arbitrary modification of the pledges the artists set and is underhanded at best, but it's not the artist's fault. Realistically, the change is pretty small and certainly won't stop me from supporting the artists I follow. I wouldn't ask them to shoulder the burden of Patreon's poor decisions, splitting and obfuscating their so called service fees.
Jingizu
2017-12-08 05:52:55 +0000 UTCThanks for the thought. I'll be honest in that this change doesn't bother me all that much. Granted I only pledge to a few creators & none of them operate on a "per-post" system (not anymore). At the end of the day, this'll cost me about $4 extra each month. I wouldn't ask you to lower your tier prices. I don't like this on principle but the amount is just too small to get upset over. (and yeah i know- "this is just how it starts")
Elberik
2017-12-08 03:26:09 +0000 UTC
