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I mean, how many ways can you say "To make this viable, we need more money. That can come from you, or it can come indirectly via fees to your patrons. Which wo

I mean, how many ways can you say "To make this viable, we need more money. That can come from you, or it can come indirectly via fees to your patrons. Which would you prefer?"

ceejayoz 9y ago
I'm fine paying a transaction fee. I'm not fine paying seventeen of them for my swarm of little $1-3 pledges that get billed as one monthly transaction.
- falcolas 9y ago
  According to the expanded initial blog post, it would not have been all at once, but over the course of a month, corresponding to when you created a pledge. Not a good model imo, but at least it wasn’t totally insane.
  - ceejayoz 9y ago
    No, that "not all at once" is precisely what made it insane. All at once is good. Their credit card fees have a percentage component (1.9% for Stripe) and a fixed, per-transaction component ($0.30 for Stripe). All at once means that fixed component gets charged once per month. Moving to a one-transaction-per-pledge model means that fixed component is multiplied by the number of pledges, which dramatically increased costs for users like me with a bunch of small ones.
    - falcolas 9y ago
      Well, I would have considered "charge all at once" combined with "charge for every individual service charge" to be insane. But... semantics. Charge once and apply one service fee would make a lot more sense. Also, for online transactions, Stripe's percentage is 2.9%. Of course, there's a lot of caveats to Stripe's pricing, so I'm sure the actual charge amount changes.
      - ceejayoz 9y ago
        Stripe has volume discounts. Patreon's Zendesk until recently listed 1.9% as their Stripe rate.
michaelt 9y ago
I don't think any of the blog posts Patreon made said that? What they said was: "We're changing our business model to make every subscription a separate credit card charge, instead of bundling all subscriptions into one monthly charge. The credit card processing fees will be radically higher, so we're passing them on to you, but we won't make any extra money from this ourselves" Personally I found their decision pretty baffling, as in my book the monthly aggregation was the main thing differentiating their product from Paypal, Stripe and suchlike.
- delecti 9y ago
  Agreed. I can easily afford the fees they were adding, I'd be totally fine bumping my single monthly payment by 3% + $0.35, that's pocket change to me. What bugs me is the clutter/volume (mental, email confirmation, and credit card transaction) associated with splitting my convenient single monthly payment into more than a half-dozen separate charges throughout the month, depending on whether each creator's campaign is on a monthly or per creation basis on top of increasing each of those sub payments by that same fee.
  - da_chicken 9y ago
    Yeah, the charges need to accumulate throughout the month and then fire off on the first of the following month. That will cover both monthly and per-creation payments, and it minimizes the number of transactions that Patreon has to pay to process and the number of transfers they have to make to creator accounts. I understand that people want their money right away, but if they're allowing payments as low as $1, then they need to limit the number of transactions somehow.
    - delecti 9y ago
      Their big blog post actually explained (IMO) fairly well the logic behind their decision. Patreon works differently from many subscription models which have you on a monthly basis pinned to the date you started. If you start Netflix on the 15th, you'll be billed on the 15th each month. Meanwhile if you start a Patreon pledge on the 15th there's the issue of whether you're charged on the 15th for the first month or on the 1st of the next month. And if the latter, what about pledges that unlock additional rewards, can those people cancel before their first actual payment? Essentially they have a lot of complicated problems to solve, they just picked a solution that introduced a whole lot of new problems for the very people who provide the life blood for the service.

I mean, how many ways can you say "To make this viable, we need more money. That can come from you, or it can come indirectly via fees to your patrons. Which would you prefer?"

ceejayoz 9y ago

I'm fine paying a transaction fee. I'm not fine paying seventeen of them for my swarm of little $1-3 pledges that get billed as one monthly transaction.

falcolas 9y ago
According to the expanded initial blog post, it would not have been all at once, but over the course of a month, corresponding to when you created a pledge. Not a good model imo, but at least it wasn’t totally insane.
- ceejayoz 9y ago
  No, that "not all at once" is precisely what made it insane. All at once is good. Their credit card fees have a percentage component (1.9% for Stripe) and a fixed, per-transaction component ($0.30 for Stripe). All at once means that fixed component gets charged once per month. Moving to a one-transaction-per-pledge model means that fixed component is multiplied by the number of pledges, which dramatically increased costs for users like me with a bunch of small ones.
  - falcolas 9y ago
    Well, I would have considered "charge all at once" combined with "charge for every individual service charge" to be insane. But... semantics. Charge once and apply one service fee would make a lot more sense. Also, for online transactions, Stripe's percentage is 2.9%. Of course, there's a lot of caveats to Stripe's pricing, so I'm sure the actual charge amount changes.
    - ceejayoz 9y ago
      Stripe has volume discounts. Patreon's Zendesk until recently listed 1.9% as their Stripe rate.

michaelt 9y ago

I don't think any of the blog posts Patreon made said that? What they said was: "We're changing our business model to make every subscription a separate credit card charge, instead of bundling all subscriptions into one monthly charge. The credit card processing fees will be radically higher, so we're passing them on to you, but we won't make any extra money from this ourselves" Personally I found their decision pretty baffling, as in my book the monthly aggregation was the main thing differentiating their product from Paypal, Stripe and suchlike.

delecti 9y ago
Agreed. I can easily afford the fees they were adding, I'd be totally fine bumping my single monthly payment by 3% + $0.35, that's pocket change to me. What bugs me is the clutter/volume (mental, email confirmation, and credit card transaction) associated with splitting my convenient single monthly payment into more than a half-dozen separate charges throughout the month, depending on whether each creator's campaign is on a monthly or per creation basis on top of increasing each of those sub payments by that same fee.
- da_chicken 9y ago
  Yeah, the charges need to accumulate throughout the month and then fire off on the first of the following month. That will cover both monthly and per-creation payments, and it minimizes the number of transactions that Patreon has to pay to process and the number of transfers they have to make to creator accounts. I understand that people want their money right away, but if they're allowing payments as low as $1, then they need to limit the number of transactions somehow.
  - delecti 9y ago
    Their big blog post actually explained (IMO) fairly well the logic behind their decision. Patreon works differently from many subscription models which have you on a monthly basis pinned to the date you started. If you start Netflix on the 15th, you'll be billed on the 15th each month. Meanwhile if you start a Patreon pledge on the 15th there's the issue of whether you're charged on the 15th for the first month or on the 1st of the next month. And if the latter, what about pledges that unlock additional rewards, can those people cancel before their first actual payment? Essentially they have a lot of complicated problems to solve, they just picked a solution that introduced a whole lot of new problems for the very people who provide the life blood for the service.