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Things to know before starting a Patreon page
- thomas 6y agoRegarding most of this: I think this is why they built (bought?) Memberful.
- figgyc 6y agoMemberful was indeed an acquisition: https://memberful.com/blog/joining-patreon/ https://memberful.com/blog/joining-patreon/
- ehutch79 6y agoI'd love to know what the other options are out there, as mentioned in the article. Right now, patreon is well known, and I'd be concerned with an unknown site turning supporters off.
- cosmojg 6y agoLiberapay[0] is my favorite. They're a nonprofit funded by donations through their own platform, and they don't charge any fees. [0] https://en.liberapay.com/about/ https://en.liberapay.com/about/
- kradeelav 6y agoSubscribeStar is popular among creatives https://www.subscribestar.com/ https://www.subscribestar.com/
- elicash 6y agoSelf-host ghost.org?
- quadrangle 6y agoHere's a thorough summary: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfunding https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfundi... (at the wiki of still-not-launched different type of patronage platform that is sharing its own research)
- mirimir 6y agoLooking through that, I see some Bitcoin-driven services. What I don't see are any that accept payments and pay out via a wide range of channels, from PayPal to Bitcoin. And for Bitcoin, I don't mean Coinbase or exchange accounts that enforce KYC rules. Stripe used to work with Bitcoin, but no longer.
- smichel17 6y agoWe don't proactively search for new services or re-review those listed to make sure the information is still up to date[1].. but we do update the page if we hear about new ot changed services through other channels. So, if you or anyone else are aware of particular services that are notable for their flexibility in payment providers, please let me know and I'll add them to the page. That said, I would not be surprised if none exist. The more payment processors you support, the harder it is to avoid handling the money directly, which means more legal hurdles (regulations, liability); the simpler alternative (that snowdrift.coop is currently pursuing, for those practical reasons, although it is limiting in some respects) is to coordinate donations though other platforms. [1]: Aside, I was trying to write this sentence in the form "re-review the information for [up-to-date-ness]", but couldn't think of the right word. "Accuracy" is close, but doesn't capture the element of time. Any ideas?
- mirimir 6y agoup-to-date-ness = currency It's not the usual meaning, and so confusing, although arguably the meanings are fundamentally consistent.
- ivan_ah 6y agoGumroad has been pretty solid for all things I've tried. They have subscriptions, which is not exactly Patreon, but essentially the same kind of thing (recurrent payments).
- voiper1 6y agoI'm not totally sure what the UX is for a non programmer, but stripe is an option. They just released a customer billing portal for users to self-manage their plan on recurring billing. Sounds like it could hit many of the features.
- serial_dev 6y agoI know locals.com. I like their UI and they have a couple of bigger names on their platform. My impression is that most of the creators lean right.
- wishinghand 6y agoI keep hoping a self hosted option will pop up that’s easy to setup with Docker or an NPM install.
- redis_mlc 6y agoThe article is complaining that Patreon is not a full banking app. Well, duh. Patrons and small-time creators are very happy with what it does, and don't care about what it doesn't do - Patreon pays the monthly rent of a lot of artists who have no other short-term options until their career is in full-swing. By contrast, Youtube is notorious for being unreliable as a revenue source. My only complaints about Patreon are: - the app is one of the slowest web apps today. Actually, I lied - it's the slowest. Shame on the programming team behind this. Get your shit together. - they just started charging sales tax on donations if the creator offers rewards content (almost all do so.) That doesn't make sense for posting a video link a day early, foreign artists, etc. - I think a VC bought Patreon. We know how that always ends. My suggestions are: - profile the app performance and fix it. - maybe ask the article author what he's expecting for discoverability on a payment app. Perhaps adding a couple pieces of metadata alone might help? Source: I used it daily as a Patron from July, 2019 through June, 2020 while providing feedback to a creator.
- pencerw 6y ago(Author of the blog post here) Point taken, though I'm not sure that's exactly what I said. My complaint re: accounting is that Patreon integrates horribly with QBO. If they cared, they would have a webhook that rolled up all collected pledges, payment processing fees, sales taxes and platform fees into a single sales receipt so that QBO et al could ingest and record it as a sale (or a list of sales). Also, the thing about "revenue" vs "earnings" on their creator side analytics is just straight up deceptive. They don't need to be accounting software, but that doesn't mean that they can throw around accounting terms however they want.
- redis_mlc 6y agoI don't know any artists who use QuickBooks, so I'm not sure where you're coming from. You're in some kind of parallel universe to the people happily using Patreon to collect from their followers. And they don't care about "revenue" vs "earnings" since they went to Berklee College of Music, and just want to pay their rent this month. To be constructive: - explain your use case in your blog. Perhaps you have an advanced use case that would be a good roadmap for future features - or go use Stripe or Paypal payments for payment processing. Patreon is community funding software.
- stickfigure 6y agoI would add - as a patron, the UI is horrible. The one thing I'd like, when I subscribe to someone, is a list of patron-only content so that I can slowly go back and watch/listen to/read past material. Instead the only option is an infinite-scroll style blog roll, which makes it extremely hard to go back and pick up where you left off. It's also impossible to navigate in anything other than inverse chronological order. Atrocious.
- nitwit005 6y agoI'm fairly sure some people are clicking the heart (like?) button on every post they read to know when they can stop scrolling.
- 936936 6y agoThere is an option for normal chronological ordering on the posts page though I can't comment on the mobile version. A curious thing I noticed was every time I loaded more posts it would take longer than previously. Going through hundreds of posts like this would result in waiting for minutes for the next set of posts to load in.
- zelphirkalt 6y agoYou could keep the e-mail in a "to do" or "to read" state and get to it this way later.
- SomewhatLikely 6y agoI interpreted their comment to be about content created before they became a patron, so there would not be an email.
- zelphirkalt 6y agoAh, right, of course. Had a brain fart there.
- cactus2093 6y agoI don’t follow what you mean by wanting a list of this content, then you go onto describe the list that they give you. If it was just paginated and let you sort forward or reverse chronologically, is that all you’re asking for?
- zzzeek 6y agoPatreon does not seem very spectacular but I don't exactly see what the reason not to have a patreon page is. I have one and it is one of several different income sources for my open source work. it's 100 bucks a month I wouldn't have otherwise.
- bestnameever 6y agoThank you for SQLAlchemy and Mako. My first project was with Pyramid and your tools made it easy so I'm not surprised you have contributors.
- johannes1234321 6y agoReasons can be different: - Taxation can be complicated depending on where in the world you are - Being paid can feel as a responsibility and you are doing this for fun - You are employed for working on the project or have some nother clause preventing being paid - You might be rich :-D
- sitkack 6y agoPatreon is run by clowns. They closed my account for "fraud". My credit card, my name, my billing address, trying to give money to patreons, tech support is useless. The fact that they can't run a viable business AND they do stuff like this, I'd personally like to see them slowly go out of business so it would give time for their users to find another platform. Please, everyone, stop using this horribly run service. Use github, paypal, gumroad, something, anything, but not Patreon.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoFunny enough, I asked someone I patron if I could just Zelle them the money every month instead and they sent me their info. Takes me about 2 mins a month, and I’ve cut Patreon out of the transaction, so win win.
- jaredsohn 6y agoSome banks let you automate Zelle, too. Citibank doesn't but Chase does.
- torartc 6y agoDidn't they also have a large data breach?
- sitkack 6y agoPSA: If you are in the USA (and 32 other locales), setup a github page and use github's sponsor functionality. They take no cut. https://github.com/sponsors https://github.com/sponsors
- egypturnash 6y agoWorks fine for me, when I'm not struggling to make progress on my work due to waves vaguely at 2020, Patreon lets me pay my rent by drawing comics about robot ladies with reality problems and cartoon animal space operas. YMMV obviously. I don't use any of its integrations, I just go to the web UI and upload a new page and type some stuff about it now and then, and also hit up my gloriously-unfashionable Wordpress-based site and add the same file to the secret-patrons-only whole-chapter-WIP page. Which does not bother doing any authentication because it's all ultimately gonna be free on the public pages of my site anyway. I might get a bigger percentage if I fucked around with some other way to create recurring payments, sure. But my experience is that people now know what is up with Patreon, and are much more likely to say "okay sure I'm in, I'll give you a few bucks per page of your weird-ass comics for a while" than to sign up for anything else I've ever done. Like I think I got all of fifty bucks, once, out of the Paypal donation button I used to have on my old comics. I've gotten several years of paying my rent out of Patreon and that lower signup friction is well worth their cut IMHO. (I will note that I do kinda feel like Patreon's sort of abandoned the per-creation model, it's not uncommon to see them roll out new features that only work on the monthly model. Which really doesn't work for someone like me who can go silent for months at a time due to depression.)
- Traster 6y agoYou're completely right that the paypal "Donate" button was a complete dead end. I suspect though, that Patreon has actually just changed the audience expectations around how they're going to support creators, and if you went to the trouble of throwing up a simple patreon style page on your own using one of those cheap template websites, that's probably much closer to the success of Patreon than the paypal button. I'm not actually saying you should do that - obviously for most small creators a small percentage of a small amount is totally reasonable. But Patreon have a real problem if anyone successful naturally grows out of their platform.
- jes5199 6y agoyou know that feeling when you worked at a company, and you tried to push it in a certain direction, but the powers that be made it impossible to really get to the core issues? yeah.
- akling 6y agoI'm currently using Patreon and GitHub Sponsors to accept donations. If you are doing anything software related, I would definitely encourage you to set up GitHub Sponsors right away. GitHub Sponsors: - Zero fees (compared to the ~10% Patreon takes) (!) - They match all donations (up to a limit of $5000) for the first year (!!) - Great exposure. Tons of people have found me through GitHub. (I don't think anyone ever found me through Patreon.) It's still worth it for me to use both services, as some people have strong feelings about one or the other. And in fact, I also have a PayPal for people who don't trust either one. :)
- gadders 6y ago4. If you are slightly more right wing than Mitt Romney, you will get banned.
- jtbayly 6y agoI must have missed a story or two. Can you point me in the right direction for further research?
- gadders 6y agohttps://unherd.com/2019/01/the-politics-of-the-patreon-purge/ https://unherd.com/2019/01/the-politics-of-the-patreon-purge... https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvqeev/crowdfunding-site-patreon-is-purging-far-right-figures https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qvqeev/crowdfunding-site-... https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/the-alt-right-has-a-payment-processor-problem https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/the-alt...
- jtbayly 6y agoThank you. That's helpful.
- vaibhavthevedi 6y agoThis is a detailed analysis. I was thinking to start Patreon but I tried Buymeacoffee page and turns out, it is slowly becoming like Patreon only. But better.
- billpg 6y agoIf you send money with the expectation of a perk or reward, (other than the continued production of the video/podcast/etc) than you're not really a patron any more. You're a customer.
- WhyNotHugo 6y ago> If your intention is to build a meaningful income, there are much better options out there than Patreon. Naming at least one in the article wouldn't been helpful.
- Traster 6y agoI'm not really sure what Patreon is to be honest. It's not payment processing - they're literally passing those costs to you. It's not a community, there's no cross-patron promotion or discoverability. It seems like it's essentially just a bad version of square space that wants to charge you a percentage of your revenue instead of $20 a month. It had this exciting opportunity to build a platform, but I think that time has passed, they've chosen not to do it, so all they have left is some rather poor CMS with an exploitative pricing model.
- eythian 6y agoIt's a centralised (not great) publishing platform where the main feature is that it supports "micro" payments. As a user (rather than a creator) I like it because I don't have to faff around with separate payments across multiple sites, just once a month my credit card is billed the sum of all the sponsorships I want to make and I get an email to tell me where it all went to. I will tend to think twice before setting up a recurring donation to something that's not on patreon, simply because it's something new for me to keep track of. TBH I almost never use it to get to the actual content, it's usually for sponsoring podcasts etc. that I was already listening to.
- Traster 6y agoWhat throws me off about it being a platform is that ther'es basically no discoverability - you search for what you want, but it's never going to say "Hey, yo liked X, what do you think of Y"
- eythian 6y agoYeah. Kickstarter, for example, is good at that. I've backed a number of things because their recommendation system thought they might be interesting, and they were.
- kalleboo 6y agoI'm curious about the fee structure. I was under the impression that the vast majority of patronships were $1/mo. Maybe it's varies among media, since I only subscribe to YouTubers. I pay $1/mo to like 15 different YouTubers. This adds up to $15/mo which to me is a reasonable price for entertainment. With patreon, I get billed once a month and their fees end up being like the article writes around 12%. If all these YouTubers switched to something like PayPal, now they'd be paying 30% fees on $1 payments instead.
- Tomte 6y ago> If your intention is to build a meaningful income, there are much better options out there than Patreon. I would have liked the author to expand on that (bolded) sentence. If he knows better options, please tell us!
- deostroll 6y agoI would add that Patreon is not built for creators from India. The most important thing for a creator like me is that money gets directly transferred to my bank account; not my credit card or my paypal account. It's a psychological thing. And I think it is a significant thing because that is our middle class culture. Here a significant portion of the population don't spend money on their credit cards like people in other countries do. The only two options on patreon are a credit card and paypal. The latter is also not that much in vogue. These are just my thoughts.