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Patreon 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 inc

by zzzeek 6y ago

Patreon 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 ago
Thank 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 ago
Reasons 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 ago
Patreon 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 ago
  Funny 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 ago
    Some banks let you automate Zelle, too. Citibank doesn't but Chase does.
pencerw 6y ago
(Author of the post here) I actually kind of agree with this: Patreon is indeed a good way to earn enough money to buy dinner once a week or whatever. I guess it's also good for big time influencer types who are in growth mode and not worrying about their overhead. I just think it's a mediocre solution if what you want is to create a stable, predictable, and mature small business out of your work. I totally appreciated Patreon when I was starting out; it just really sucked to scale on, and switching to a more legit system was somewhat painful.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  Which system did you switch to?
  - wishiwasoutside 6y ago
    This is covered in the OP.
  - executesorder66 6y ago
    It's mentioned in the middle of the post: > I moved to a combination of Quickbooks Online ($645/year; note that Intuit is a terrible company) and Squarespace’s ($480/year) recurring products feature. But the squarespace's recurring products feature seems focused more toward physical products than digital creative artifacts which I mainly associate Patreon with.
    - majewsky 6y ago
      It's always hilarious how broken the American banking system is that you need to pay over $1000/year worth of tooling to receive recurring payments from patrons. In the EU, you would just open a deposit-only checking account and paste its IBAN (International Bank Account Number) on your website, telling people to setup a recurring payment through their online banking and put their e-mail address or some other ID number in the message field so you can link it back to their account. All that for the price of a checking account, which wouldn't be much more than 10€/month. It's a bit of a barebones system; you wouldn't use it to handle 1000+ subscribers because the linking-back-to-their-account step would be manual. If you're on the scale of 10-100 subscribers with monthly or yearly payments, it works great. Several podcasts I listen to take donations like this.

by zzzeek 6y ago

bestnameever 6y ago

Thank 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 ago

Reasons 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 ago

Patreon 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 ago
Funny 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 ago
  Some banks let you automate Zelle, too. Citibank doesn't but Chase does.

pencerw 6y ago

(Author of the post here) I actually kind of agree with this: Patreon is indeed a good way to earn enough money to buy dinner once a week or whatever. I guess it's also good for big time influencer types who are in growth mode and not worrying about their overhead. I just think it's a mediocre solution if what you want is to create a stable, predictable, and mature small business out of your work. I totally appreciated Patreon when I was starting out; it just really sucked to scale on, and switching to a more legit system was somewhat painful.

sillysaurusx 6y ago
Which system did you switch to?
- wishiwasoutside 6y ago
  This is covered in the OP.
- executesorder66 6y ago
  It's mentioned in the middle of the post: > I moved to a combination of Quickbooks Online ($645/year; note that Intuit is a terrible company) and Squarespace’s ($480/year) recurring products feature. But the squarespace's recurring products feature seems focused more toward physical products than digital creative artifacts which I mainly associate Patreon with.
  - majewsky 6y ago
    It's always hilarious how broken the American banking system is that you need to pay over $1000/year worth of tooling to receive recurring payments from patrons. In the EU, you would just open a deposit-only checking account and paste its IBAN (International Bank Account Number) on your website, telling people to setup a recurring payment through their online banking and put their e-mail address or some other ID number in the message field so you can link it back to their account. All that for the price of a checking account, which wouldn't be much more than 10€/month. It's a bit of a barebones system; you wouldn't use it to handle 1000+ subscribers because the linking-back-to-their-account step would be manual. If you're on the scale of 10-100 subscribers with monthly or yearly payments, it works great. Several podcasts I listen to take donations like this.