cubewatermelon
patreon
About these Patreon Changes (And a bonus 'paper)
🕑 Added 2017-12-08 01:00:01 +0000 UTC OooOoofa.So if you're been on twitter or whatnot in the past 24 hours, you've probably seen a lot of us getting mad about these proposed changes to Patreon's fees. Long story short, there's going to be a new fee added on to all pledges on the patron's side, while a smaller fee is removed from the creator's end.
They released an explanation for these changes, which was clearly BS and made a bunch of us Very Annoyed. They just now released another, more plausible explanation, wherein they had to change their charging structure based on switching to charging pledges up front and billing again exactly one month after your initial pledge.
Basically, we think this does unfair damage to people who support several creators at a low tier, such as $1, since the charge has a flat fee attached. If you only support one or two creators at a higher tier, you probably won't see as much of a difference, but the fee will still be a bit higher.
All in all, it's very frustrating, both as a creator and a patron of other creators. If we take them at their word on their SECOND explanation, then they basically created a new problem that required an expensive solution, and now they want us to be grateful that they didn't charge it on the creator's end @__@
These changes aren't supposed to be implemented until later in the month, so I'm hoping we get a bit more better info or, ideally, see some kind of change in this plan. If not, I might be restructuring my tiers to try to keep things reasonable for everyone.
In the meantime, I will absolutely understand if anyone has to adjust or drop their pledge. I'll also probably be making a ko-fi or something if anyone would prefer to support me somewhere else. Basically, and I'm not sure patreon understands this, but you guys really are all super important to us and have our utmost respect, even if you're just at the $1 level. I've said it before, but patreon is currently half my income. That's HUGE, especially from something that is 100% voluntary on your guys's part.
I've always been grateful to patreon as a service for enabling this, and I hope they haven't completely lost their way. But I'll keep you guys updated as best I can as things unfold (without spamming you too much ^^;;)
Meanwhile, I remembered that someone said they'd be interested in a wallpaper of that Please Stay Calm panel, so I ended up making a lil' mashup of my favorite Undine panels from this chapter. Back to working on the next page, where I'm sure everything is definitely okay!!!
Comments
Klaus
Recurring payments should be possible with paypal. It would defeat the purpose though. Paypal asks 2.9% + 0.30$ for each sale, and direct transfers don't look too different. So far it was simply better, because the total number of transactions presumably was lower (one per creator, one per patron, whereas now they bill as if each patron-creator-combination were a separate transaction, corresponding to the best possible outcome of direct support.)
Digee
I hope they back down because Lord in Hell do I not want to even look at Drip. That site is a table flipping mess.
Kaz Redclaw
I'm exploring options for supporting different ways right now, like keeping a spreadsheet of who I need to pay on paypal every month.
