Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[c13303]

Hi,
I was supporting both DF and Peridexis at small monthly amounts on Patreon, but i'm upset with their new fee policy ( link )

What do you guys think about direct money wire, monthly, from bank with IBAN ? 

I'm just wondering .. You think it's a good idea or would it be too much of a mess, or too personal ? Or legally dangerous ?

(I mean as pure donations .. no goodies)

As a dev myself, it's also about thinking of anon-profit open plateform for money giving to artist, an open-source tool (instead of Patreon / bandcamp etc..) even if I believe it will be hard to skip the Paypal part

[Kirkegaard]

Toady have not been on Patreon long, before that he just used paypal (and others) to receive donations. However it is quite clear that patreon have raised the total income by quite a lot.

For someone like me, that supports 10-15 different things with 1-2$ each, these new changes are really bad. They do increase the price by something like 35-40% with no upside for anyone but Patreon (the company) and I do feel quite robbed. That so large a % are being paid as a hard fee (+ 25% VAT on top of that in my case). A 1$ support ends up costing close to 2$. That is not right and I do consider cutting down on the number of people I support or stopping using it altogether

I really hope Toady use his position as a quite large player on Patreon to complain to the company. I already have, but do of course not have the same impact as a 5K/month creator.

[Mesa]

As a dev myself, it's also about thinking of anon-profit open plateform for money giving to artist, an open-source tool (instead of Patreon / bandcamp etc..) even if I believe it will be hard to skip the Paypal part

That already exists and is called Liberapay.

I don't donate to DF specifically but this really seems like a huge dis-incentive to $1 donations, and a lot of Patreon-backed content creators are suffering for it as people drop out, especially those who donate $1 to multiple people. It's really shitty and I hope that Patreon rolls this back because it straight up benefits nobody but themselves - I get it, they need to run and pay for the whole service and all, but at what cost?

[c13303]

That's it, they are killing 1$ donators. Is it a good strategy ?

Thanks for the Liberapay link, that's what I was looking for. Then I've searched a bit and found also https://opencollective.com/

(Liberapay looks more EU-based and OpenCollective US-based ? )

There's always a bank price but in some case that's unbeatable, for example wire from € to € can cost 0,5% (but apparently 20% if sent to USD) (still : you don't pay another company that takes another 20% on top of that)

I'm a bit surprised those plateforms aren't more famous ... is it about advertising ? profitability ?

Anyway, they seem to be the place where to start. If Toady or Peridexis move to this, I'll support them again. And I'll support the founder of these projects too !

[bombcar]

I've gone back to having my bank mail checks to Toady, once a year or so. No fees on my end, and probably none on Toady's either.

[frightlever]

I'm not going to be changing my pledges for now - $12 in pledges which costs me £11-ish including VAT and which will be going up to around £12.50, I reckon, with the new charges, but the wording of the statement on this is annoying to me.

“With this update, creators will now take home exactly 95% of each pledge with no additional fees”

Why not 100%? If you're going to differentiate between the pledge and the fees, why not separate out all the fees and make the pledge the actual amount the Creator receives? It all seems like mind f**kery on the part of Patreon, like people won't figure out that their dollar pledge is actually costing them $1.38, freak out and cancel. And yeah, I get that only that 5% of the pledge is the amount that Patreon collects... or is it? If payment processing is less that the 2.9% + $0.35 charge, does Patreon keep the excess?

I can understand that creators are concerned about variable fees each month and this seems to be Patreon's way of addressing that, but their Blog article also mentions that they have to deal with thousands of support tickets every month.

"It’s a lot to understand — for scale, we receive literally thousands of support tickets (complaints) about payments confusion every single month."

Seems like weeding out the lower value pledges would greatly reduce their support costs. I doubt it's that cynical, but I don't know how viable Patreon is, so maybe they literally have no other choice if they want to stay afloat.

[Max™]

I still can't see why if I am giving Patreon say, $40 and that ends up split between 10 creators who get pledges from other people each month, are they saying they have to do each pledge transaction one at a time?

Code: [Select]

$4\                /$4 creator
$4\\              //$4 creator
$4---- Patreon ---- $4 creator
 ...
$4//              \\$4 creator
$4/                \$4 creator
Giving 10 transactions that are each totally individual (wouldn't it be 20 though?)

Instead of:

$40(to 10 creators) --- Patreon(tallies the full pledges for one creator including my $4) --- $4(plus the other x dollars) creator

For 1 transaction to Patreon, one to each creator.

If they aren't charging the fee for the transaction to Patreon and the one to the creator then what are they saying, they really do have to process each one singularly?

[Capntastic]

They retracted the whole idea and apologized

Hurray

[Kirkegaard]

Yeah! So remember to re-activate your pledges if you removed them

[jamoecw]

Toady have not been on Patreon long, before that he just used paypal (and others) to receive donations. However it is quite clear that patreon have raised the total income by quite a lot.

For someone like me, that supports 10-15 different things with 1-2$ each, these new changes are really bad. They do increase the price by something like 35-40% with no upside for anyone but Patreon (the company) and I do feel quite robbed.

the money actually was going to go to the payment processors (paypal or stripe), not patreon. those people were not making money off of the increased fees as they make less from small charge amounts (the amount of work that goes into a charge is the same whether it is large or small). basically patreon made a decision that cost everyone money, as pladgers would have to lower their pledges to pay out the same amount, and the amount going to the creator is less percentage wise. patreon has to deal with more transactions (so if one source has an issue they have to deal with then they just multiplied it, though they are hit the least by this change). the payment processors tend to break even or lose money on really low transactions.

since toady is in the US he should be using stripe instead of paypal, if he has the choice through patreon.

[Kirkegaard]

the money actually was going to go to the payment processors (paypal or stripe), not patreon.

That is not true at all. Patreon do not charge my credit card 10 x 1 $ (+ fees) they do one single transfer, and then they split it. The change was a way to increase the revenue for patreon.