Update to the Patreon fee structure changes.

UPDATE: Patreon decided against rolling out the payment changes: https://blog.patreon.com/not-rolling-out-fees-change

I personally dislike making this kind of posts, but I feel I own it to my supporters to keep them up to date.

So as mentioned in the last post, Patreon is passing the processing fee to the patrons (you). The thing is, if you plug in the numbers, you will notice that the processing fee had actually gone up. This is most noticeable in the $1 pledges where the processing fee is a whooping ~40%.

Patreon posted a update here explaining why this is happening: "Right now, we keep those fees as low as we can by charging patrons once every month across multiple pledges — that’s why all charges come on the first day of the month."

Basically what happens is that say if you pledge 1$ to 5 different creators. Instead of there being 5 different transactions, they are bundled together as one $5 transaction. To reduces the times the $0.35 fee are paid from five times to once. Thus, everyone enjoys lower fees.

However, patron is planning to charge at pledge anniversary (every ~30 days) instead of charging everyone at start of each month. So it looks like this:

One effect of this change is that Patreon loses it's ability to bundle the charges together. And quite frankly, this screws over the patrons who pledge $1 to many creators, badly.

What motivates Patreon to do this? Well, it says:

we need all creators to get the benefits of charge up front.

we need to eliminate the “double charge” scenario that harms patrons today.

Those are certainly reasonable goals but it does beg the question of whether this change is handled appropriately. Perhaps Patreon should have asked for more feedback from creators on this change. Perhaps it should have given a longer notice. Perhaps there should be an opt-in opt-out option. I don't know, but it is what we will be dealing with in the future.