This theory is plausible but I don't think it's a perfect explanation. Someone else has pointed out that Apple does the same thing and does not run afoul of mon

This theory is plausible but I don't think it's a perfect explanation. Someone else has pointed out that Apple does the same thing and does not run afoul of money transmitter regulations. But I would point out that Patreon has faced a ton of heat for this decision, they KNEW they were going to, and they could easily have said "We had to do this so we didn't run afoul of money transmitter regulations." My theory is that this is mostly making people angry because it addresses the pains of a different group of creators. We know that Patreon exhibits a winner-take-all dynamic, in that the largest creators are orders of magnitude more successful than the average creator, similar to music, books, and other entertainment markets. (I suspect that Patreon also has a "whales" dynamic, where a small number of patrons are responsible for an outsized proportion of payments, but that is not necessary for this explanation). The largest creators on Patreon face a free-rider problem with the existing system. Someone can subscribe, access the back catalog of content, then cancel without ever reaching the batch date. The largest creators are probably giving Patreon the feedback that this is a major issue. Since the largest creators make up 80-99% of Patreons revenue, the solution for them is to make the first month an immediate payment, but to do that means you need to get rid of batching. Small creators also face the free-rider problem, but most aren't doing it as a professional enterprise (by definition they don't make a living off it). They face less of an risk of piracy since no one is motivated to pirate everything, and they care less in any case since the stakes are lower. The patrons who support the small creators mostly are supporting many, so they will have to pay a much larger tax to PayPal and Stripe under the new system, but since this isn't really where Patreon's bread is buttered, their concerns did not control the product decision. Other explanations (fraud, money service regulations, unwillingness to take on technical complexity) can explain why they didn't follow any of the obvious mitigation strategies (like prorating the second month) but they don't explain fundamentally why this change is being made despite the obvious harm it causes to vocal prior fans of the company. The fact that Patreon is trying to put an altruistic spin on it is just normal business behavior.