PATREON STAHP

So Patreon just rammed through a change in how fees are handled without consulting its userbase at large, and it is genuinely awful, and their response to creator outrage is not encouraging.

In the past, transactions fees were subtracted from the amount the Creator received. You donate a dollar, I got less than a dollar, that was fine. Cost of doing business. Literally: at tax time, I wrote it off as an expense. There's even a specific category for it ("transaction fees," or something like that).

Now, though, Patreon has decided that you, the Patron, should pay those fees. So if you pledge at $1, they are going to charge you $1.35.

...

I can come up with many words to describe how wrongheaded this is, but none of them are good enough. This is going to decrease the number of patrons people can afford to patronize. It's going to cause a lot of patrons, who were already on limited budgets, to cease pledging at all. And all of us pointing this out to Patreon isn't causing them to say "Wow, we should re-evaluate." Instead, the response we're getting back is "You should explain to your Patrons why this change allows them to support you better and isn't actually a problem!"

...

As you can guess, I'm not going to do that. In my opinion, they've decided to stab you in the gut and tell you it's a privilege, and oh, by the way, they're doing it for my benefit, and I want it. But I don't, and they didn't ask me, and they didn't ask a lot of people, and they don't appear to care that we hate it. So I am trying to figure out what we can do about it. I'd hate to leave Patreon when Patreon solves so many problems for me neatly (and your combined patronage is a big chunk of my monthly income). But I didn't sign up to disrespect my fans. I'd much rather do some cumbersome Paypal subscription thing than watch them mess with you like this. Well, with those of you who are left after you discover that the budget you worked out for supporting artists has been slashed by a third.

But hey, maybe they'll realize they made a mistake and roll it back. We can hope. In the meantime, if you have suggestions for subscription-based content systems, I'm all ears.

(Edit: Okay, it's even WORSE than I describe. My math was off. And not in a good direction. See the comments.)