Suspending payments until this gets figured out

From their apology letter, they seem to operate in a totally different way than I assumed... if they are processing 150million in donations and are still charged those rates from the CC company there is something really wrong with all that. I want all my pledges to be processed once a month so that minimizes the CC fees and the most possible goes to the creators, with patreon taking their cut (which seems kinda high itself, in the long-term). Glad they aren't making the change, but hope they figure things out going forward. Best of luck growing the following.

I don’t like the change (or the way they communicated it as ‘best for our creators’ when it’s demonstrably not for small pledges). But my goal is to support creators - I don’t think you should suspend payments and I’ll maintain my pledge. If you want to switch to another system though, I’ll follow.

Always wondered, how much of a 3$ pledged actually reaches You. Fees on my side thus in accordance with my intent of supporting You. Patreons notification with revoke option reached me dec. 7. I was surprised that it is possible at all, to make 3 or even 1$ pledges feasible at all. On patreons side resources and people are needed, to make it happen, after all. However, when such a policy issues causes losses of Patreons, Patreon should rethink their communication with its customers. For my part I see no reason to leave. Hope issues get sorted out soon, so that You can concentrate on Your work. A big thankyou for Your very responsible reaction! Your work is wonderful, very important, and deserves every buck You earn, 10 to the n'th times!!! All the best from Hamburg:-)

I'm ok with any way this works - I just want to support you and I hope you can activate the payments soon again. Thanks for all the great work and for being so honest.

Might be ironic but I pledged after reading this. Mostly because I couldn't think of other ways to show my support.

So apparently they want to switch from 1st of the month payments to paying for every patreon on the same day of the month as you first pledged to them. Not bundling payments means an increase in fees, and rather than patreons receiving 70% of a $1 pledge they decide to give them 70% of a $1.30 pledge. I don't see any problems with bundled payments though, so I don't see any reason to make a change that results in an increase in transaction fees every month.

Vi, jes thinkin out loud here, but if you do a video explaining this whole mess it will serve as fair and conspicuous notice of the change and then to my capitalistic mind you do not need to suspend payments, which would be a substantial hit none of us wants you to take. You can even get referrals from Patreon if you make the change sound OK and rake in a ton more patrons. (The capitalist in me never sleeps.)

Patreon have lost my trust forever, I'm afraid. Whether it's greed or dishonesty or total incompetence I frankly don't care, any of those things are equally unacceptable. I don't want anyone I pledge to already to suffer a loss in income but you can be sure I won't be pledging to anyone new on Patreon and I will be moving my existing pledges to another platform as soon as the people I pledge to make that possible.

From my perspective as annoyed as I am at Patreon, I'd rather the people I contribute to have financial stability until the situation gets figured out. There's a bunch of alternatives on the horizon but it looks to me like they will need time to be fully functioning, and the disruption from the creators getting effectively furloughed would be severe in its own right.

The only reason I know about this is because of artists like you telling me about it. I never got an email from the company, saying that my monthly payments would go up, go down, or change in any way. I am concerned that if I had a fortnight where I was delayed in checking Patreon posts of artists, (this has happened occasionally due to work) I would never have known about it at all....

It’s so strange to me how they are doing away with the one differentiating feature of patreon, which is bundling payments. If they are trying to solve the problem of uncertain transaction fees for creators, they should be doing better predictive modeling, but better yet, they could be using it as an incentive to encourage patrons to give to MORE creators! For example, if I’m a creator whose patrons are all $1 donors with no other creators to support, my transaction fees are going to be the highest possible. Patreon could tell me this, and I could encourage my patrons to go support another creator that I like as well! This would mean the processing fee wouldn’t come solely out of my cut, and would be spread around instead! Everybody wins! (except the card processors, so, good.)

I don't think it's financially prudent for you to suspend payments to you. Patreon makes the rules, and it's up to each of us (both creators and donators) to decide whether to stay or leave. I will say that there seems to be a stark difference in the way Patreon verses its creators discuss the change. Patreon: We have a solution to some problems you guys didn't even know existed! It's to charge you additional fees! Now everything is wonderful! Creators: I don't know about this. Hitting the donators (especially the small donors) with new fees might scare them away.

Vi, please grab a sharpie and color me annoyed. I think you have done the right thing, and I hope in causes Patreon to do the right thing. Changing terms of service like this, so unilaterally, is just not cool. I can think of at least two ways Patreon could have done this better: (1) allow Creators to select whether they want to shift to the new terms, and put the onus on the creators to explain their choice to their own audiences, and (2) use some sort of majority voting system whereby once a certain percentage of creators and/or donors provide their enthusiastic consent, then treat that as a truly democratic vote to move to the new system. If 80% of creators and 80% of donors are happy with the new setup, I could be happy with it, too. I'm not going to quit supporting you, but Patreon should know that people like me are far more enthusiastic about supporting the creators we support rather than the platform that clears our donation. If you move to a new platform, so will I, and so will the clearing fees that accompany each of my donations.

This seems to be making more problems than it's solving. Bring back the bundling!

I believe that the 7-15% figure Patreon gives includes their own 5% income, so processing costs are in the 2-10% range.

you know what bugs me is that it still says: "You will be charged $1.21 on January 1st and then the 1st of each month going forward." if I go to edit a pledge. That is a filthy lie, patreon. I also really would have appreciated that the email informing me of the change would have informed me of how much that would cost me, instead of patreon expecting us to do the maths

Stick up a PayPal address and I'll send the December payment directly. I'm sure many would support you this way until you've decided one way or the other with Patreon.

While I understand your position and respect your integrity in not taking any money you are uncomfortable with, I am personally fine with the change. It's not ideal, but it is a cost I'm willing to take on to support you, Vi.

I don't mind paying the PayPal fee of 2.9% + $0.30, but charge it only once per transaction, which should be once a month. Then Patreon gets its 5%, the creator gets 95%, and the patron pays about 5% if their monthly patronage is about $14.29.

I value your work and want to support you no matter what. I definitely do hope the fees don't shake down as poorly as they sound on the surface, but even if they do, I want to keep supporting you.

Vi, I support you and I even though it wasn't what I expected, I don't have a problem paying the credit card fee in addition to my pledge. i'd rather do that then to see you not be able to continue what you're doing.

Thanks so much for your explanation, I'd mostly only heard grumbling, but between your description and the addendum to the fee-structure Patreon blog post (<a href="https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee-structure/),">https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee-structure/),</a> I think I have a clearer idea of what problem they're trying to solve -- making recurring payments occur on the anniversary (luniversary? menseversary?) of the first occurrence, and per-item payments at the time the item drops, (a) prevents close-in-time recurrences that resemble double-charges, and/but (b) implies unbundling, which removes the effective discount from bundling, which they decided to pass on to the patrons. This almost doesn't affect me, my Patreon footprint is small, and the $0.35 is a small fraction of my commitment, so if this is the new normal, and you decide to stick with Patreon, I'll be here. My fondest hope for this process is that Patreon doesn't make this the new normal, and finds a better way to fix their unbundling problem. Allowing creators to absorb the fee seems like a valuable tool for helping to fix it.

Thanks for taking a stand Vi! If you do decide to move to a different platform which does not have these problems managing micropayments, please do let us know. I would be willing to jump ship immediately. My patronage is towards you, not for Patreon or credit card companies.

While I admit, I've only heard from the creators I contribute to, they all seem shocked and upset about the impact of this change toward their patrons. Patreon implies they're doing this as a service to creators, but it seems that the creators didn't see it as a problem. As a business owner, credit card fees are a cost of doing business. Although to some, their creations are not meant to be a business, but in essence they are. You're already giving 5% to Patreon, some additional goes to payment processing. Nothing unreasonable about this. One of the other creators that wrote about this said it's partly to allow them to charge people on their pledge anniversary, so you wouldn't pay for an initial pledge on the 29th and then again on the 1st. But that's a one-time problem. $0.35 + 2.9% is the going rate for credit card processing, and if all pledges remained together on a monthly basis, it wouldn't be such a big deal. But making them rolling means one charge per creator (or if they're actually planning to charge once per video on per-video pledges, that's even worse) which means you will pay $0.35 per creator. It discourages small pledges because the fees represent a large percentage, but it also discourages large pledges. If you want to donate $1,000 to someone, it's a penalty to be charged another $30 on top of that. For the recipient, yes, you're not getting $1,000, but it doesn't seem as bad. I really hope they go back on this. It seems really ill conceived. It's like stores that want to charge a fee to accept credit cards. It's allowed now, but I consider it tacky. Increase your prices if necessary, but don't penalize people for choosing to pay you one way vs. another.

According to their recent blog post, Patreon wants to I've away from charging only once a month for all creators combined, and do instead charging on each anniversary of when you first started. The fee change was done with this in mind, given that each pledge WILL be a separate transaction with separate fees. Patreon's not doing this you steal your $0.30 per pledge, it's actually the cost of the payment. That said, it's still a dumb as balls move. It's so much easier to plan around a subscription coming in once a month, and given how Patreon's image is the one site to support all your creators, it should remain a once a month payment. This all came from the whole creators feeling cheated by people subscribing then cancelling before the first payment, and after that paying for a full month when you subscribe, then at the end of the month after. This is stupid. Can't they just prorate it for how much time is left on the month? Remember, Patreon's not going to get any $ from this change, it's all going to the payment companies. Why not save everybody some $ and kept it the it fucking was. Don't fix what ain't broken. Or at least make it opt out. Vi is obviously not affected by the problem this change is trying to solve, so we shouldn't go through this.

I'm totally confused by what Patreon could be thinking. If they're going to still be bundling charges up into a once-a-month payment, then the extra $0.35 per pledge seems like a pure money-grab going directly into Patreon's pocket. And if they're doing individual charges, then they're making my credit card bill needlessly cluttered as well as throwing money at the credit card companies instead of the people we want to support. In any case, I'm willing to wait a bit and see what happens. If you prefer to switch to some other service, let us know.

I think their most fundamental flaw here is that Patreon sees the creators as their customers and sees the patrons as interchangeable cogs in their money machine that can be easily replaced. They completely lost sight of the fact that patrons are the customers of the creators. They also forgot that their only real usefulness that couldn't be replaced by free blog or email list tools was lower fees through charge aggregation, but that's a less fundamental mistake.

I haven't read all the previous comments. As a donor who generally keeps a balance in a PayPal account, I'd be happy to make my transfers PayPal to PayPal for 0% fee. If you accept PayPal, count me in for that.

I ran the numbers on last month's patronage. I would have been charged an additional ~$28 (21%). I have some creators that have per-month support, so I would incur just the once-monthly fee for them, but I also support several per-creation creators (mostly podcasts) who chose that format in good faith with their patrons so that their charges would be as fair as possible. This turns that logic on its head, sadly, as credit card fees are assessed each time. I have contacted one project who is changing to a per-month campaign. What I feel would be beneficial would have been providing options to the creators. Some wish to carry the burden of fees knowing that their bottom line will take that hit. What I don't get is that while they cite ill-faith pledges to justify the need for the payment-up-front option, I don't see any effort to control the retroactive reach of patrons to access content from before their pledge. Doing this would de-incentify many ill-faith pledges.

There was certainly a communications failure on Patreon's part. I do appreciate the increased transparency. And, I do realize that financial transactions are costly. But, given that they're billing me once a month for all the creators I support, it doesn't make sense that there is still an additional "per-pledge" fee even though my pledges are bucketed together into a single transaction. If they're billing Paypal or my credit card once for all my monthly pledges, than that 0.35 dollars per pledge is getting pocketed by Patreon, and is not needed to cover the financial transaction. The beauty of Patreon is the ability to have lots of people each support creators at a small level ($1, $2, $5)... but that only works if they set up a transaction structure that makes sense. I hope that this communications mistake also helps them go back to the drawing board and reconsider how to set this up in a way that gives the highest percent to creators like you. If not, then I hope that another company takes advantage of the opportunity that Patreon is creating, and that new company is set up in a way to maximize the support to creators and minimize the transactional costs. I get that there are real fiscal challenges, and that credit cards have fees, but the existence of this platform has the potential to minimize that impact - especially the per-transaction impact. I don't see why I can't have an account with Patroen, that I refill $20, $50, or $100 at a time, with each refill being a single credit card transaction and in which my pledges get subtracted from what I've paid. There would still be the 5% for Patreon (which maybe they could drop to 3%?) and the 2.9% for the credit card. But, at least it would drop the percent impact of the painful 35 cent per transaction fee for small pledge values.

I don't really have an opinion on how fees should work, but even if the new fee structure is clearly better for everyone, it should have been introduced more carefully, and with explicit consent of the people it affects.

You are the only artist that i make donations to. Your videos regarding the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio are what birthed my love of math and I can say that without a doubt. Because of your move to suspend donations, I know that I can trust you when it comes to my donations and that you care about me. Due to that, i will continue to donate for as long as you let me. I really appreciate your transparency through all of this.

Vi, I guess I applaud you on suspending payments for a while, though I don't agree that's what you should do. Your comments to your patrons (that's me!) should be enough. I think Patreon will come up with some sort of one time pay thing, whether it will be the way I do it (I'll just donate $25 once a year, and deal with losing access to your stuff), or a one time payment that will give a full year of access (Jack, are you listening?).

I think this shows Patreon needs a better communications plan. I suspect, like you, that there are good reasons involved, and that the people involved have good intentions. However, the suddenness of the move, the lack of options, the fact that creators weren't warned in advance, and the fact that there's no real channel for feedback (other than repeating "because of new fees" on every patronage I drop) shows they did not think through the communications plan. I'm not going to drop supporting you because of it, but I do encourage you to keep fighting for what you feel is right. Don't compromise yourself, trust in your fans, and I'm sorry this is all getting in the way of your art.

FWIW this change isn't a big deal to me, I'm only upset about it hurting creators. Happy to keep payments going.

It's simple, I like your work and want to pay you for it. I donate small amounts to a number of creators. I understand that someone has to eat the fees. I'd prefer it be Patreon. I'll accept it being me and I'm glad it's not you. It should go without saying that I'm loyal to the creators I support, not the platform. If you go elsewhere, I will, too.

I think the new system (aside from the particular fee structure) makes more sense, and is a good step towards transparency. On the other hand, the transition messes up everybody's contribution and reward level decisions. Also, I think they probably came up with the fee structure as something that would cover the costs and not change the average that people pay, but didn't at all preserve the balance of lots of small contributions versus few large contributions. Having grown up with "$10 credit card minimum" signs, I wouldn't expect to be able to give someone $1 at a time effectively, and I wouldn't be to surprised if they just didn't consider that part of the curve.

As far as I can tell, the opt-in Patreon offered Patrons was the announcement, which was emailed to some of us (but apparently not all of us). There has been no other method used for me to approve a change in my pledge or charge.

Remember when Taylor Swift wasn't posting her songs on Apple cause of fees, then Apple just happened to alter their fee structure shortly after her famous "complaint?" Something tells me a "community demanded" Patreon currency is coming soon/.

While I strongly disagree with the change, and how Patreon decided to sneak that behind everyone's back and pretend this is "for the greater good" (even though pretty much all the feedback I've seen from creators and patrons alike is negative), I feel this would be unfair to punish you and other creators because of Patreon's decision. I'll see how it goes when the change goes through (if it goes through - hopefully not), but I don't intend to drop my support. I'm not faulting anyone who decides to do so, though - it's perfectly understandable, and if a patron can't afford or don't want to pay those fees, then there's not much to do about it. I still hope that there will be enough feedback sent to Patreon to force them to undo the change, or at the very least, allow creators and/or patrons to opt out from the new system. As far as I know, there is no way to opt in or out, and it doesn't seem to be planned. If the vast majority of people disagree with it, forcing the change to go through will simply show how little they listen to those who make the platform live.

You'll be fine, and will land on your feet regardless. You have so many people who care about you, and are willing to support you; you're far wealthier than you realize. Thanks for using your judgement, being courageous, and for taking the high road!

I suppose personally I’m a bit agnostic to it. I’d rather know you’re getting the amount I’m giving, and will often choose to pay fees when donating via PayPal or similar. It would have been nice if Patreon gave more of an advance notice so that those who cared could make adjustments or give feedback, but I can imagine that Patreon probably made their decision based on what they thought would benefit their business model the most. I won’t be changing amounts or who I support on Patreon because of this change, but that’s just me.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this as well! As of right now the only message directly from patreon I recieved was the short email where they announced the change in their fee structure, but no way to give my explicit permission to charge more next month. I personally cant afford the change and have therefore canceled all my pledges and am looking into alternative ways of supporting the creators I like. This is in no way a reflection of my opinion on the creators/artists themselves and I am really mad that it can look this way to them right now.

I appreciate the heads up you gave us. I back about a dozen creators at the $1 a month level, and what I did was drop two and lower my one $2 a month pledge to $1, leaving the one $7 a month pledge alone. I figure that this will remain in my budget. It's very confusing though.

Taking the high road, Vi! You’re the best.

My priority is for you to get paid. I got a notification. I wonder if you didn't because you were expecting to get two, but they only sent you the one for creators? I agree that this was poorly handled, but TBH I am not okay with you getting screwed because of it. You have to make a living. If you really really super insist on suspending payments, I can respect that, but it's a really frustrating outcome. I've appreciated your work for a long time, and I've been really delighted to actually be able to support it.