We want to reduce our $12 & $7 memberships to $5 - but we need YOUR help!

Luke and I have had a scary last month. Because I recently tried an intensive workout protocol to get my POTS into remission by enlarging the heart (it was working!), my joints all started very obviously dislocating and that unveiled a more sinister problem. 

It turns out I have a connective tissue disorder called Elhers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS). And, you know, it’s so funny. I felt really sorry for myself when I thought it was the common Hypermobile type (hEDS), because it still sucks - by my understanding, it worsens over your lifetime, with chronic pain, osteoarthritis, nerve damage (so usually chronic nerve pain later on too, which pain meds don't help). Depressing stuff. But now I would be SO THANKFUL if that’s my diagnosis! 

I saw a specialist, and while I met the diagnostic criteria for the hEDS, I was told based on my symptoms we need to rule out two other forms: Classical EDS (worse than hEDS, bendy heart valves may wear out and need to be replaced, but not as bad as the next one), and Vascular EDS (horrific: arteries and hollow organs randomly pop, unusually soft tissue can’t really be repaired, blindness, bleeding into the brain, median lifespan for females is 50, males 33). That the last one is even on the table for me and our boys has been terrifying. We’re waiting on a genetic test, I’ve been praying that it comes back negative so I can willingly bear the cross of the hEDS instead (God willing). 

I’ve always tried to be authentic with our posts, and this ties into our new pricing. Since becoming disabled and joining a bunch of online support groups, I’ve really had my eyes opened to how “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”.

So many people bear terrible burdens, alone, or in silence from their public lives. And the majority of GMs cancelling our Patreon have told me its because of financial hardship - many of you are feeling the squeeze of the economic recession at the moment, or flat out losing your jobs (and NOT because you’re not intelligent or competent, those of you I have spoken to are easily high above average in my humble opinion. It’s why I don’t bother mincing my words, you guys are smart!). 

So, I’ll be frank with you, because this is important to my point. It’s also been really tough on Luke and I since we became parents. Our income took a major dive when I stopped working (no matter how good your work is, if you don’t market it no one will find it—and Luke is too close to his work to sell it confidently). We’ve been living beneath the poverty margin here in Australia for about 2 years now. I’d love to get it up to minimum wage again, and stop budgeting so hard, but we technically are ok. We have food, we have shelter, and clean clothes on our backs. And we’re frugal, live muchly below our means, so we’ve been covering the added medical bills ok too. Thank God. 

Why am I explaining all of these overly personal, awkward details?

I want to be clear that we’re not dropping our prices because we can necessarily afford to. We’re dropping them because we want to help our amazing community, who are also going through a tough time financially with the current economy. 

Speaking from experience here, small things like friends, family, good food, and keeping up fun hobbies like TTRPGs can help us persevere through incredibly difficult times. So, we want to do our part with the skills we have to make the world a nicer place.

The beauty of digital products is that they can scale with minimal cost. We don’t have to pay for printing, storage, shipping, etc. So we’re bringing our prices down, to help out GMs who otherwise couldn't afford VTT ready battlemaps or campaigns, and might not have the time or energy to prepare those themselves (because they're working multiple jobs to make ends meet, or studying, or on disabilities pensions with illnesses like chronic fatigue, etc). 

Luke and I are agreed in that we want to take this hardship we are suffering through, and use it to bring something beautiful and good into the world. That is the meaning I can find in it. We don’t have the skills or ability right now to go do real work, like fight to increase adoption rates so more orphans or foster care children end up stable forever homes (an issue that I care about). We are artists and storytellers. This is our skillset. 

This is what we can realistically do to make the world a nicer place, right now. So we’re doing it. 

Our Patreon? It’s overpriced. Aside from creating our new $3 tier (which buys a monthly campaign sourcebook with 5-10 FoundryVTT ready & printable battlemaps), were also working on a plan to lower the membership prices. 

Without completely shooting ourselves in the foot, so we can actually keep creating the content you guys value. We’re walking a bit of a razor’s edge here, but I’m hopeful we can pull it off. 

The goal is to sacrifice our increasing profit margin as Patreon grows to bring the prices down for all of you, without lowering the current amount we make further. 

So for example, lets say we get 30 new members on our $12 Forger of Worlds tier, because of the increased profit we’d be able to bring down the price down by $2 for all members of that tier, without our current profits going lower than we currently are. In effect, the more patrons we get, the lower we can put the prices.

When we get enough new members at the lowered price, we’ll bring the membership price down again and again until it’s super cheap thanks to everyone putting their pennies in. At least that’s the plan! Currently we would love to bring it down to $5 and if we can make it happen, reevaluate then (for example, continue lowering prices, or save GMs more time like getting our maps done in Roll20 too?).

That brings me my other point. We’re adding more value to what we make for you lovely GMs, to help you save time so you can go do more meaningful and good stuff with your short, mortal lives. That is to say, moving forward our campaign sourcebooks come in two editions: one with 5e mechanics, the other is system agnostic (as we know a lot of you value system agnostic). Luke’s also doing the 2D monster tokens and weapons / items I mentioned above. System agnostic is sadly going to be behind the paywall, because giving the 5e content away for free is going to help us grow the fastest and bring our price down the fastest (I’m sorry, this was a really difficult choice).

Are we very sleep deprived? Yes. But if my candle is going to burn short, I’d personally like it to burn bright. If I die early, Luke will likely need to stop Seafoot Games, go onto welfare, and focus on raising our sons as a single father. So we are agreed on doing what we can, while we can. 

Ok, that’s the bulk of it. Heavy? Yes. Important? Also yes. Ponder your mortality and live the best you can, you beautiful GMs. Thank you for everything. 

ROADMAP: How do we take our $12 and $7 memberships down to $5?

We can't do this right now without killing our family's main source of income, so we need your help. Here's how we will make this happen, realistically. When we get 30 new members on the $12 Forger of Worlds tier (currently we have 117, so we need to hit 147), we will bring the cost of that tier down to $10. It's similar to the $7 Adventurer of Legends tier; we're at 140, when we get 30 new members (170 total), we'll bring the cost down to $6USD.

Then, when the new $10 FoundryVTT tier has something like 50 new members after the price reduction (197 total), we'll bring the membership fee down again, and repeat, until both tiers are $5USD and then merge into one tier. To track all of this we'll be putting a cap on new members for each of the tiers and when the cap is filled (which means no new members can join) we'll lower the price and add a new cap.

Why merge the tiers together? Part of cutting expenses so we can charge less also involves making our content faster and cheaper, so hopefully we can get back up to minimum wage without charging you lovely folks for it. By merging the two tiers into one, it halves my workload listing everything to DriveThruRPG twice (currently once for FoundryVTT only, once for the print and basic VTT battlemaps only) so you can all download the maps easily.

I hope this makes sense. :)

As part of this plan to reduce tier prices, we will also be reducing our available backlog.

We will be limiting our backlog to 1-2 months worth of battlemaps (50-100 battlemaps). Our goal in doing this is to reduce Patreon churn, and increase stability. We don't want to collapse our business by cutting our prices, then having a bunch of people join, download everything, and leave. We do offer our website for very cheap purchases (no map is more than $0.99 each, bundled maps as low as $0.07), but to confidently calculate this roadmap on Patreon we need to make membership as stable as possible.

If you are currently a free member, please consider upgrading so we can bring the prices down as quickly as possible (or share our work around on social media so strangers can find us and hopefully join). Imagine if enough people join the FoundryVTT tier this month, next month you'd be paying only $5USD for heaps of content (instead of the current $12). The faster we can do this, the sooner everyone can save more money.

Thank you for your patience reading all of this. I hope you have a meaningful day.

Beb and Luke