4 ms·

I currently earn $941/month on Patreon and I am grateful to my patrons. However if you are reading this and you support me, I would kindly ask you to do the cho

I currently earn $941/month on Patreon and I am grateful to my patrons. However if you are reading this and you support me, I would kindly ask you to do the chore of switching over to GitHub Sponsors. They take 0% of the donation, as opposed to 10%, and although I would prefer to use a not-for-profit service, the fact that Microsoft is already well-established financially and Patreon is on a collision course with Capitalism, the GitHub Sponsors money feels more secure. In my opinion it was deeply unethical to start Patreon as a startup instead of a non-profit. How can you justify it? For-profit means the goal all along was to skim some portion off the top rather than to make a livelihood enabling content creators to make ends meet on their own.

masklinn 6y ago
> In my opinion it was deeply unethical to start Patreon as a startup instead of a non-profit. How can you justify it? Non-profits seem rather complicated / constrained, at least in the US (but probably elsewhere as well) e.g. you could ask the same about Mozilla. Also, why is it unethical? Middlemen are a universal fixture of US society. And patreon does provide value in convenience and reliability over the previous standard of… idk, beg for donations via PayPal or something?
foxdev 6y ago
WordPress.com with one of the paid plans is good for the same reason. It's backed by a real company that's been around a long time in tech terms. Their membership thing works similarly to Patreon in that a person manages their subscriptions in a central location instead of going through different proprietary payment flows, but the money goes to your Stripe account. It would be nice if they also made the subscription in Stripe so it's portable, but Automattic has been around long enough to trust with handling it. On the customer/supporter side, I think knowing they aren't at the whim of the blog owner for cancellation is a perk.
- tallgiraffe 6y ago
  WordPress raised on a 3 Billion valuation last year. They are very much on a unicorn track.
  - foxdev 6y ago
    I'm not sure what this has to do with my comment.
jfengel 6y ago
I'm surprised it's only 10%. Just dealing with credit card fees is going to cost them ~2%, and probably more since they take so many tiny donations. Then they have to deal with chargebacks, customer support (both for patrons and creators), and the overhead of building out the business. A nonprofit isn't all it's cracked up to be. It must means that it doesn't have shareholders who own the company. It can still pay employees, sometimes very well. It gets tax benefits in exchange for limiting the kind of business it does to something for the public good, but Patreon doesn't really fit those existing categories very well. It looks more like a payment processor, the kind of service you hire like a web page developer or carpenter. I suppose there's room for somebody to try to squeeze them out by charging even less, perhaps by dogfooding their own service. But if they're charging only ten cents on the dollar, there's not an enormous amount of room for competition, and you'd need to start by raising a ton of money from people purely for charity.
tallgiraffe 6y ago
Interesting view, but what would you do when Github grabs a market share, and then start to take 15% off? I am not trying to be cheeky here, legitimately curious. Microsoft isn't in the non-profit business either, and they will try to make money off anything they could. For example, did you know that when Microsoft bought NPM, they starved NPM employees for oxygen, forcing people to quit over time, as they were unable to work on anything? That's anecdotal, and I am simply trying to say that MS isn't charity. Maybe it's worth it to support Patreon and help them to avoid (delay, perhaps) their future predatory behavior? I am just brainstorming here. I don't know what the right answer is.

masklinn 6y ago

> In my opinion it was deeply unethical to start Patreon as a startup instead of a non-profit. How can you justify it? Non-profits seem rather complicated / constrained, at least in the US (but probably elsewhere as well) e.g. you could ask the same about Mozilla. Also, why is it unethical? Middlemen are a universal fixture of US society. And patreon does provide value in convenience and reliability over the previous standard of… idk, beg for donations via PayPal or something?

foxdev 6y ago

WordPress.com with one of the paid plans is good for the same reason. It's backed by a real company that's been around a long time in tech terms. Their membership thing works similarly to Patreon in that a person manages their subscriptions in a central location instead of going through different proprietary payment flows, but the money goes to your Stripe account. It would be nice if they also made the subscription in Stripe so it's portable, but Automattic has been around long enough to trust with handling it. On the customer/supporter side, I think knowing they aren't at the whim of the blog owner for cancellation is a perk.

tallgiraffe 6y ago
WordPress raised on a 3 Billion valuation last year. They are very much on a unicorn track.
- foxdev 6y ago
  I'm not sure what this has to do with my comment.

jfengel 6y ago

I'm surprised it's only 10%. Just dealing with credit card fees is going to cost them ~2%, and probably more since they take so many tiny donations. Then they have to deal with chargebacks, customer support (both for patrons and creators), and the overhead of building out the business. A nonprofit isn't all it's cracked up to be. It must means that it doesn't have shareholders who own the company. It can still pay employees, sometimes very well. It gets tax benefits in exchange for limiting the kind of business it does to something for the public good, but Patreon doesn't really fit those existing categories very well. It looks more like a payment processor, the kind of service you hire like a web page developer or carpenter. I suppose there's room for somebody to try to squeeze them out by charging even less, perhaps by dogfooding their own service. But if they're charging only ten cents on the dollar, there's not an enormous amount of room for competition, and you'd need to start by raising a ton of money from people purely for charity.

tallgiraffe 6y ago

Interesting view, but what would you do when Github grabs a market share, and then start to take 15% off? I am not trying to be cheeky here, legitimately curious. Microsoft isn't in the non-profit business either, and they will try to make money off anything they could. For example, did you know that when Microsoft bought NPM, they starved NPM employees for oxygen, forcing people to quit over time, as they were unable to work on anything? That's anecdotal, and I am simply trying to say that MS isn't charity. Maybe it's worth it to support Patreon and help them to avoid (delay, perhaps) their future predatory behavior? I am just brainstorming here. I don't know what the right answer is.