Actually, I've just had a read of this and it looks a bit worrying:
Credit card fees
Stripe fees (credit card) - 1.9% + $0.30 per transaction.
PayPal fees - 5% + $0.05 per transaction.
Credit card fees are completely dependent on your patrons, their pledge amounts, and their payments. We bulk process all patron pledges to decrease fees. That means if I’m supporting two creators my credit card or PayPal will only be charged one time for all of my pledges. Those fees will then be split among the creators.
Transfer fees
US creators receiving payment via Stripe - $0.25 fee for every deposit.
US creators receiving payment via PayPal - 2% of the amount transferred capped at $1 per deposit.
International creators receiving payment via PayPal - 2% of the amount transferred capped at $20 per deposit.
International creators receiving global bank deposit via Payoneer - $3 transfer fee per deposit
*This does not include any fees associated with converting USD to your native currency.
Correct me if I'm wrong but since I put my credit card down and I'm only supporting DF, this is where my $1 goes
0.30 - credit card fee for transaction
0.02 - 1.9% credit card fee for transaction
0.25 - transfer fee for my deposit
0.05 - 5% patreon fee
i.e out of my $1/month, 0.62 or 62% is not going to DF.
It says that DF has 970 patreons and there are 645 of us doing $1 or more a month. That means 325 are giving less than $1/month.
At $0.55, DF recieves nothing. Does that mean if someone was to give $0.50 cents, DF would actually have to pay MORE in fees than actually receive from donations?
I'm now thinking of just cancelling the account and giving a decade's worth of donation in one go. Fees would go from 62% to 2% of $120.
At this rate 2/3rd of my donations and most of those giving less than $1 would go to stripe and paypal.
It's not *quite* that bad; the Stripe / PayPal payouts are when Bay12 withdraws at the end of the month; they get a lump sum and only pay the one fee. So with any reasonable amount of contributors, far under 1 cent goes to that. But, yes, about 37 cents of the first dollar goes to overhead, and only 63 cents to the artists; credit card transactions are *expensive*. There are reasons many businesses have a $5 minimum bill to use a credit card, or whatever.
Out of your first dollar, 37 cents goes to overhead, and 63 cents goes to who you are supporting. But out of your second dollar and each subsequent dollar, only 7 cents goes to overhead, with 93 cents going to who you are supporting. Many artist types on Patreon set their lowest support levels at around $3 a month because of this; overhead is 37+7+7 = 51 cents, payout to artist 63 + 93 + 93 = $2.49; they're getting about 83% net.
Note also that Patreon is designed to try and optimize much of that away; if you support multiple campaigns, that 30 cents flat fee is divided amongst them, since Patreon only charges your card once per month. Supporting three projects at $1 each is very nearly as efficient as one project at $3.
tl;dr: try to spend at least $2 per month over all of Patreon if you can, and ideally $3 or more; otherwise, much of your effort goes to overhead. (But, if you really can only spend the $1, the 63 cents the artists gets is better than nothing