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How to compete with Patreon

265 points by rwmj 3y ago

dyeje 3y ago
Discord could eat Patreon’s lunch overnight if they wanted to. Every Patreon I’ve been interested in was just a paywall for a Discord community.
- kro 3y ago
  Discord has already started integrating their own payment for content/channels recently. https://discord.com/serversubscriptions https://discord.com/serversubscriptions
  - squigz 3y ago
    And they desperately need to roll it out to more countries... sad Canadian noises
- diggan 3y ago
  Funny, none of the Patreons I'm subscribing to or been interested in, has been paywalls for Discord communities.
  - corbezzoli 3y ago
    Same, I only hear about Patreon on YouTube.
    - concordDance 3y ago
      Fiction authors are who I give my patron money to.
  - stinkytaco 3y ago
    Half of them provide discord access and 75% a custom rss feed for a subscriber only podcast in my list. And frankly, I only take advantage of a couple of those. Mostly I just do it to throw a few dollars to stuff I like and don't use the perks. I can't be the only one.
    - scantron4 3y ago
      This for me. I don't use patreon perks for the people I support on an ongoing basis. I have subscribed for perks (templates for some productivity tool) and then unsubscribed a couple of months later, but that wasn't an ongoing creator I watch all the time. I guess getting my SMBC comics by email is convenient but I already have an RSS feed reader and early access isn't important.
  - fortran77 3y ago
    All the Patreons I subscribe to are YouTubers (Big Clive, Technology Connections, etc.)
escritor-ai 3y ago
[flagged]
thriftwy 3y ago
[flagged]
hknmtt 3y ago
I am actually developing a platform to compete with pateon. And the author is quite naive in his complaints. You cannot do business and be anonymous. The tax man would eat you alive. At least outside of USA. You also need a license as sole proprietor or be incorporated as a company in order to make repetitive sales and not one-offs. So again, no anonymity whatsoever. "by works" payment model is illegal. You can receive donations or have subscriptions or pay per view but you cannot "maybe deliver", "deliver maybe one work, maybe ten". Again, illegal as fuck. "Non quid pro quo patronage" - again, donations solve this. They are legal and easy without any hustle, as long as the payee is aware what is the purpose of that payment. "api / audience relation system" - well, i am trying to run a business, why in the world would i give api access to third parties without being able to monetize it? each api call costs me resources. nothing is free. not to mention that giving access to api might go against my financial business altogether by moving some financial transactions out of my business into foreign business that is monetizing my api. Author is very naive in his complaints in general. The red tape you have to go through these days for a simple(it's not a rocket science) website is astronomical. The technological issues(like finding a bank with an actual api that works and does not charge you per payment is close to impossible) too are unending hurdles being thrown at you form left and right and the bigtech-monopolized internet does not want you in it competing with their services or NOT using their services and infrastructure to build yours. You think streaming video is free? Try finding a place to host the video and send it over the network for amount that your income can cover and allow you still to make a profit. Good luck. Yes, i have solved all these issues. But it is so damn hard, that these complaints don't even scratch the surface of how impossible it is to start something serious in this monopolized era of the internet and red tape. You just have no idea. You don't.
- raincole 3y ago
  If someone thinks they can have a competitive edge against existing market leader by 1) have an API 2) make UI faster, they probably lived in an echo chamber for too long and really need to spend more time with non-developer people. Perhaps their other points are valid. Admittedly I don't know enough to tell.
- jaggederest 3y ago
x0x0 3y ago
I think the real answer may be that patreon is, actually, a bad business; and that nobody has cracked microtransactions. Separately, while Patreon's charging changes seem boneheaded, I'd guess at least a 50% chance that they weren't driven by stupidity but rather by a CFO having a come to jesus conversation with the e-team. Driven by the fact that microtransactions run on a credit card are tough. Their giant raises make more sense if they were eating a ton of fees in an attempt to hold out for scale where enough people (eg I spend $20-ish/mo on patreon) charge enough money that the 5% covers the processing fees.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- raincole 3y ago
  The author starts the article with "take Patreon's lunch money". What lunch? The one VCs fed them? Is Patreon even profitable?
  - Applejinx 3y ago
    See, this is what immediately turned me off the article. I don't WANT a payment system that is about beating up other payment systems in the schoolyard and making them cry. I want a payment system that takes money on my behalf and then pays me with it. I'll put up with a lot of inefficiency if it's boring and predictable. You're gonna have a heck of a time prying me away from Patreon in favor of your new lunch-money taking payment system with crypto and hookers. If you're leading with 'take their lunch money', I don't trust you. I don't trust Jack Conte THAT much, but it's sure a lot more than you.
    - chiefalchemist 3y ago
      To your point, it's foolish to pick a fight with a grizzly bear (i.e., Patroen). It's smarter to ask: where is there a market not being fulfilled? Then if that goes well enough eventually *maybe* you look to square off with the grizz. But to run into the sprawling plenty of room forest intentionally looking for a gizzly? That's foolish.
KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
OP missed the elephant in the room. Patreon is the only platform that allows you to launder softcore (nothing explicit from in front of a camera) NSFW content with legitimate payments. There is an incredible amount of erotic artwork, drawings etc. that are sold through Patreon instead of having to resort to niche adult video site payment processors.
- egypturnash 3y ago
  Subscribestar has successfully pivoted from "Patreon but you can post right-wing propaganda" to "Patreon but with less restrictions on horny stuff". Patreon is slowly but surely becoming more hostile to horny stuff; right now I'm in the middle of going around with their support over horny creators having to provide some additional identity verification through a third-party site that isn't working on my computer or my phone.
  - kodra 3y ago
    The issue is that "less restrictions on horny stuff" means "more restrictions from payment processors" nowadays. Doubly so if you're a Russian platform like Subscribestar is.
    - egypturnash 3y ago
      hahahhaa Subscribestar is Russian? Well that's gonna be fun for all the furry artists posting super-gay stuff on there once it gets big enough for the Russian government to notice.
      - hknmtt 3y ago
        Yes, but they operate from american llc.
      - jowea 3y ago
        Wonder if they will care if it's mostly a foreign audience.
charcircuit 3y ago
There are patreon competitors. Just none of them have a pay by work feature. Consumers likely prefer a predictable expense so there isn't that much of a demand to do it that way.
- FoeNyx 3y ago
  The post mentions Tipeee but it "charges 8%" and has "invasive personal documentation requirements". Seems Tipeee is based in Paris, so the cumbersomeness may be related to EU regulations.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  There are, Tipeee is one as the author edited in. > Part of what made Patreon explosively successful, in the first place, was that Patreon had apparently cracked the code on one of the hardest problems on the internet: micropayments. > By the time Patreon had come along people had been discussing the problem of micropayments on the internet for at least two decades. I guess the author missed the years where Flattr buttons were popping up on every website, blog, and even comment ? Flattr 1.0 seems to have been killed by a combination of the 2013 Twitter APIpocalypse, being €-first, and not being based in the Silicon Valley : https://blog.hsnyc.co/post/flattr-works/ https://blog.hsnyc.co/post/flattr-works/ https://thenextweb.com/news/flattr-twitter-payments-ban https://thenextweb.com/news/flattr-twitter-payments-ban Then Flattr 2.0 tried again : https://www.engadget.com/2017-10-24-adblock-plus-relaunches-flattr.html https://www.engadget.com/2017-10-24-adblock-plus-relaunches-... And I doubt that Flattr was even the first to do the "bundling" trick, heck this is probably also what made the Minitel so successful ? But as you can see it works in the opposite way : the patrons set a specific sum of money to be distributed each month, which then gets redistributed depending on their engagement with some or other creator (which you can decide to manually boost).
  - kalleboo 3y ago
    > I guess the author missed the years where Flattr buttons were popping up on every website, blog, and even comment ? I mean I sure did. When Flattr was announced I loved the idea, and promised that I'd sign up the second I saw a flattr button on a blog post I liked. I never once saw a Flattr button outside of brokep's own blog.
Raed667 3y ago
Highly relevant video: The Rise (and Fall) of Patreon - Tom Nicholas https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mXyN3-gQwJw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mXyN3-gQwJw
- kapp_in_life 3y ago
  Only got halfway through this video. While it's interesting I find it exhausting how much he singly focuses on the VC financing. This is a classic case of mismanagement by senior management & overly optimistic decisions by the C level staff. Nobody forced them to take on that funding, and clearly it helped them in early stages to grow their company and outcompete the companies with less funding(subbable, etc.) which he handwaves away. Honestly this is the reason I generally ignore these types of video essays, the people who make them generally have the most lazy criticisms that always end up pointing to the same boogeymen(VC, capitalism, US, etc.)
  - slikrick 3y ago
    on the contrary, it's completely unsurprising that the literal only critique to be found of the video on HN (a site made by and for VC) to write off the entire video because of one of the errors. maybe reflect inwards a bit more
mattdesl 3y ago
Crypto could provide a competitive edge to certain features in Patreon (and Bandcamp). - Instead of 4-7% payment processing fees, it can be effectively zero[1] - Instead of 8-12% fees (or 15% in case of Bandcamp), crypto industry standards tend to be in the 0-5% range. It’s not always clear to me as a creator and patron why such a significant amount of value needs to be captured for a digital asset sale. - Users of the platform could be given more control such as forking the OSS protocol if the core devs go off the rails or try to extract more than what users feel it’s worth. This is especially interesting given the recent polarizing changes to Patreon and Bandcamp’s business structures. - Settlement times can be measured in minutes or hours rather than days, weeks, or months. - Anonymity and local-first data privacy could be achieved, at least theoretically. Practically, very few L2s have yet to reach complete privacy using zero knowledge proofs and related cryptography. - Mitigating centralizing factors such as Patreon’s control over what is a morally acceptable revenue stream. Content like NSFW art might be currently acceptable, but this could change on a dime if the company decides to change its values. Subscription and recurring payments are notoriously difficult in crypto, but “by-work” as the author puts it, i.e. “microtransactions per each published digital object” is already happening in crypto and with much lower rates than Patreon et al[2]. [1] https://l2fees.info/ https://l2fees.info/ [2] https://teia.art/about https://teia.art/about
- pjc50 3y ago
  The real feature of centralized services is anti-fraud. Conversely, the real service of crypto is easy to commit, hard to trace, irreversible fraud. (also, you've missed all the points in the original article which crypto does not provide!)
  - mattdesl 3y ago
    I did address both the OP's 1) pseudonym (anonymity) and 2) by-works, the other two points (patronage and audience relationship + API) are both viable and already very much present in crypto art communities. The real feature of crypto is decentralization, which does not need to mean fraud—in the same way that end-to-end encryption does not only facilitate criminal behaviour.
6stringmerc 3y ago
Still never got answers how Jack and Pomplamoose got away with the “Beat It” cover video that propelled him upward. Still seems shady. Still will never go near anything endorses or touched by Amanda Palmer.
- bennettbackward 3y ago
  What did they get away with? Is there some drama around that cover?
- maleldil 3y ago
  What's wrong with the cover? What's your issue with Amanda Palmer?
- mschuetz 3y ago
  It's a great cover...what do you mean with "get away with"?
exizt88 3y ago
Anyone who has tried to build a pay-by-work model for digital creators knows that it’s simply an awful business model. There just isn’t that much demand for creator work. And there are no “whales” among these customers to compensate. No one’s buying 10 copies of a math explainer video.
- chiefalchemist 3y ago
  Yes and no. It's similar - exact? - to the music industry or Hollywood. *Lots* of frogs to kiss and an occasional unicorn. The platforms would be wise to have reoccurring revenue from the dreamers, and also backend points on the unicorns. In general, in 2023+ the biggest problem seems to be signal to noise ratio. There so much content being scattered about, it's increasing more difficult to find quality. More and more (personal) resources are lost to getting past the noise. There's less time and energy left for the quality.
- ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
  If you can find a niche it can work. My friend built his own website to sell his erotic art.
  - mkmk 3y ago
    How do smaller creators manage payments in the adult space? I thought it was impossible.
    - ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
      PayPal. All the risque stuff is behind the paywall. Home page of the website gives no indication of what's within.
      - kevinmchugh 3y ago
        Given all the horror stories of locked PayPal accounts your friend would be well served too transfer money out of that account as frequently as possible.
wslh 3y ago
I am really interested in the space. A friend has launched https://www.imgrateful.io/ https://www.imgrateful.io/ and I think crypto (beyond all criticism that we can do) is an interesting option for tipping and receiving donations without the annoying friction of Paypal(s).
- manchmalscott 3y ago
  Doesn’t crypto have a gas fee or something that would cost more than most micropayments to begin with?
  - swaptr 3y ago
    not on the lightning network
    - idiotsecant 3y ago
      Let's not start down this road unless we want a detailed discussion of why the lightning network is hopium and fantasy that has fundamental basic routing flaws obvious to anyone who's built anything at scale.
      - mandmandam 3y ago
        Can we start down the road of block-lattice tech, which has been running fast, safe and free for like seven years now? It's tiresome hearing about crypto's fees, eco, and mining problems while there's a proven technology that's actually spam resistant and nearly consumer-grade actively working, right now.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    Depends on the currency, IIRC with Monero the fee is like a tenth or a hundredth of a cent.
  - wslh 3y ago
    There are technologies that does not suffer from the fee issue. Here I don't want to start a crypto war. We can even forget about the crypto charged word and think about stable coins, points and/or tokens that could be changed. I used the example of crypto just to emphasize that the current financial methods are very expensive and compliance crazy to process basic donations to developers and/or other creative endeavours. The typical "the righteous pays for the sinner".
teekert 3y ago
There are BTC lighting payments and the podcasting 2.0 movement to compete with Patreon. Mostly for podcasts and music atm but that will change.
- olah_1 3y ago
  The biggest proof to me that nobody uses Monero is that something as simple as proving payments is like pulling teeth. Yes, you can go into advanced settings and copy a payment proof. But then how do you get it to a retailer? What does the retailer do with it. It's not part of the normal consumer flow use case, and that tells me that people still think of it like a toy and not a serious tool.
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    Generally people use Monero just to hide the connection between two wallets on BTC/ETH. Either for money laundering or just privacy. I don't see why you'd need it here, where you are purchasing something legal but unpopular with payment processors.
    - olah_1 3y ago
      Why would anyone want to avoid the panopticon if what they are doing is legal? Leaving a trail of metadata on everything you do is just not always desirable. In terms of privacy, I don’t see using Monero as different from using Cash.
      - sebzim4500 3y ago
        Sure, I just mean that you don't need to directly do the payment in XMR. You can use monero to hide the provenance of your BTC/ETH/something faster without having to go through the pain of proving an XMR transfer.
      - nscalf 3y ago
        I think the caveat here for people doing something legal is the questionable future status of crypto. Countries have completely outlawed holding them before, I’d rather just not have it tied to my name if there’s any risk of it becoming illegal, if there were a feasible option.
mannyv 3y ago
There's a lot of talk about tipping, consumers, etc. Being a Patron (which is what Patreon was trying to do) traditionally meant supporting someone, no matter what their output. If your tortured genius put out one work a year, so be it. If they popped out Sunflowers then even better! There doesn't have to be any quid pro quo at all. It's what we now call Basic Income financed by someone's surplus. Don't overthink it. It's not a tip, it's a gift, an expression of support. It may be something more, but in the end you're giving money to someone, period. As an aside, it's really unclear if Patreon payments should be considered income in the US. It's a gift, but it's up to the giver to handle that. I doubt creators would need a 1099 in that case either.
- wlesieutre 3y ago
  When Patreon is structured as “For $5/month you get X, for $10/month you get Y, for $15/month you get Z” can you really argue it’s a gift? It’s very transactional.
  - efdee 3y ago
    I'm not sure how representative my personal data point is, but I don't really pay attention to the perks. I pick a tier based on how much money I want to send their way.
    - Loughla 3y ago
      I'm not sure the IRS cares about your intent. I feel like the structure is important.
  - yayitswei 3y ago
    Yes but those rewards are rarely fungible. As I understand it's more about recognizing the patron (e.g. your name in the credits) and giving them special status in the community (e.g. early access) rather than getting something of real monetary value.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  Almost all succesful creators on Patreon give you benefits for subscribing (early access to content, behind the scenes, etc.), so I don't see how you could possibly convince the IRS that it's a gift.
jp57 3y ago
I think it's cute that he thinks someone could build and maintain well all the things he wants for less than 5% in commission and also not pass along processing fees, on what he admits is a micropayment processor. That said, I don't understand the motivation for Patreon's decision to stop bundling payments, unless they're being forced to by issuing banks or payment processors for some reason. EDIT: Thinking about it more, I suspect it has to do with fraud detection and prevention. A site like Patreon is at high risk to be a place to siphon money from stolen cards: Create some fake artists and have a bunch of fake patrons pledge to them using stolen cards. This kind of scam is likely much harder to detect and prevent with bundling, when multiple fake artists can be mixed in with some real ones in a single charge. I think many people don't realize that when an online payment is charged back for fraud, the merchant (Patreon, in this case) is liable for the charges, not the issuing bank. (Well, there are some instances where liability can be shifted to the issuer, but they're not that common.) High chargeback rates can also result in higher fees for the merchant. And of course the effort to detect, prevent, and remediate the fraud has to be paid for out of Patreon's commissions, in addition to everything else.
- culi 3y ago
  Liberapay is a popular FLOSS alternative that runs solely on people donating to them through their own platform. They make ~$790 a week currently https://liberapay.com/Liberapay/ https://liberapay.com/Liberapay/ Ko-Fi is a proprietary example with 0% donation fees. They make money through a "Gold" offering and through a 5% fee on non-donation income. And they're successful enough to be hiring right now: https://more.ko-fi.com/careers https://more.ko-fi.com/careers
- notpachet 3y ago
  > I don't understand the motivation for Patreon's decision to stop bundling payments The way I understand it, the motivation is that they're losing money on bundled microtransactions until customers cross some monthly threshold (let's say that's the $14.29 mentioned in the article). So let's say a customer has a $1 monthly subscription to Creator A, and another $1 subscription to Creator B, adding up to a bundled $2 monthly charge to their credit card. That's apparently below the price point where the provider is able to offset the processing fees. Whereas if they have two separate $1 charges, that reduces the loss somehow (I'm not a payment processing expert and I didn't read the fine print that the author posted, so I don't understand exactly why that's the case.) I wonder if the "solution" would be for Patreon to have a minimum subscription model, where each customer is guaranteed to pay, each month, an amount that's above the threshold required for Patreon to avoid a loss on processing fees. You sign up as a patron, and you're automatically dinged $15/mo as long as your account is active. You can choose to route those $15 to whatever creators you want, and you'll see a single line item on your bill. And then obviously you can exceed that threshold if you want to support more creators.
kmeisthax 3y ago
There's one root cause for most, if not all of the things mentioned about Patreon in this post: Jack Conte took VC money. Neophilia is a progressive and incurable disease of venture capital. VCs aren't looking to build sustainable, profitable businesses. They are looking to buy entire market segments for later enshittification. Your job as a founder of a company asking for VC money is to construct a parallel state around your target market so that you can charge taxes on everyone in that market and that the VCs can sell the entire market to someone else for a huge profit (the "exit"). Jack Conte is very firmly an artist, and not a walking pile of technofeudalist money, so I can't help but look at this as a deal-with-the-devil scenario. Or at the very least, someone desperately trying and failing to keep the money on track. The VCs bought a payment bundler and want to turn it into a merch vendor, website host, etc.
- hbarka 3y ago
  I wonder when Varoufakis’ introduction of the word technofeudalist got into the techie vernacular.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    For me it was a few weeks ago when Cory Doctorow posted a review of Varoufakis' book.
  - ajkjk 3y ago
    Personally I read about the book and immediately thought, "yes, this is one of the words we've been needing", and then started telling friends about it.
- notabennett 3y ago
  Yes, and: Patreon is, at its core, a professional services provider for large YouTube artists. That's the segment it's best at supporting and the segment that needs it the most. But its valuation is based on the idea that it's going to capture some percentage of the entire creator economy. I do think there are some specific details about Patreon's history and leadership that make it unusually bad at running an engineering organization, even for a VC-backed startup. It has some deceptively hard engineering problems and has struggled to attract, retain, and use technical leadership equal to those problems.
karaterobot 3y ago
I don't know how common it is, but Patreon's biggest selling point to me is that I already have an account there. If there was a ton of competition, with creators I help support going to ten different platforms, I don't think I would follow them—certainly not all of them. I want as few companies as possible to have my billing information, and (all else equal) I'd prefer if that company had been around for a while. That's Patreon. And the centralization works for creators, too. I have several times discovered a creator on Patreon whose work I already appreciated, but who had not done a good job of communicating that they even had a Patreon, so I never knew about it. I only found them by accident, and pledged money to them, just because I was already on Patreon. 5% + 5% is a lot (10% if my math is right), but I'm not sure where artists get a better deal these days, at least on the internet. Further, the Patreon interface sucks for users, and I'm sure it sucks even more for creators who have to engage with it more frequently. But, not so bad that I, personally, am looking to find another alternative.
ramesh31 3y ago
Patreon (and all its competitors) at its core is a payments company. You don't compete with them by building a better front end product. You compete with them by building a more efficient payments engine with a higher margin, not tied to any third parties beyond a bank directly.
squirrel 3y ago
Micropayments, fraud, alternative transaction models — this would be a perfect topic for @patio11 . Would love to see a bits about money newsletter on this.
fluxem 3y ago
I'm not convinced by the arguments. Do the majority of creators want anonymity? I don't think so. They can set up a company and hide behind it if they do. Being an anonymous platform invites tax evasion and money laundering. Do you really want to deal with that? Why would I open up an API so that competitors can swoop in? What benefit that would provide to me? No one will use API over UI. The author clearly wants a donation platform that caters to a very niche group of users. I would guess there are less than 100 people in the world who want it (and do not need it)
- TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
  How would the API described help competitors? If I, as a creator, want to set up "Patrons of level X have access to this section of my website", and I build against the Patreon API to achieve that, surely that embeds me more in the Patreon ecosystem, not less?
- lolinder 3y ago
  > Do the majority of creators want anonymity? I don't think so. They can set up a company and hide behind it if they do. Being an anonymous platform invites tax evasion and money laundering. Do you really want to deal with that? You're completely misunderstanding their argument about pseudonymity. Patreon isn't magically exempt from KYC, they do have the real life identity of the creator. There's no legal reason why the patrons need to know everything that the company knows. From the article: > What that actually means is the platform has to allow creators (the people who charge money) to be pseudonymous (to use their stage name or pen names) in all of their interactions with their patrons (the people paying the money), and the platform, which is legally required to know the legal identity of the creator and have on file their relevant tax ID numbers (e.g. SSN in the US), needs to keep that legal identity confidential.
tunesmith 3y ago
I wonder if you could make headway by requiring a minimum $15/month from patrons, to make it profitable after processing fees (assuming the $14.29 hypothesis is correct). Aside from the folks you want to directly patronize, the rest would go into a long-tail slush fund. I guess that would chase away the vast majority of the people that really do only want to donate $3/month or whatever though...
hoofhearted 3y ago
Would anyone be interested in a self hosted version of what Patreon offers for creators? I have been working on a free Wordpress alternative that is built with React, and removes the guard rails and burdens for creators that WP creates. https://github.com/elegantframework/elegant-cli https://github.com/elegantframework/elegant-cli I have had requests to include Twitch like features such as tipping, subscriptions, and power ups. I started planning out these features to get them into the development pipeline and I realized that some of these features are the value that Patreon creates. Would developers/creators be interested in having subscription tiers, tips, power ups, rewards, etc, on their own website alongside their content? I am currently working with a local creator who recently switched over to us; and we are piloting ways to level up his content on his domain by linking his Patreon account. But as the author of the article mentioned, this creator goes by a stage name when he’s connecting with fans. https://mankini.tv/ https://mankini.tv/ https://mankini.tv/interviews/mankini-interviews-buzz-osborne-of-the-melvins https://mankini.tv/interviews/mankini-interviews-buzz-osborn...
- hoofhearted 3y ago
  I got downvotted lol.. I'll take that as a "Yes, build it" from the haters. I'll set up a payment gateway with Stripe and whitelabel their subscription service to offer content creators a Patreon like experience on their own website, and post a SHOW HN for feedback. Stay tuned : )
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
zem 3y ago
the section on "non quid pro quo" patronage perfectly sums up what i want out of the site, to the extent that i never even log in to look at "patrons-only" stuff. i pay to support artists who are sharing things with the world, so that they can continue to do so.
Razengan 3y ago
By the way, regarding software, why isn't "donationware" more of a thing? i.e. release the base product at a low price (or for free) and just give an option for users who really like it to donate you whatever they want, however many times they want.
meristohm 3y ago
I would more-readily give money to support artists if they were very transparent about their finances and how much they wanted to earn. Say my (made up) target is $50,000 a year, and if my patrons reached this goal, any further donations would cause everyone's to decrease so the ceiling was maintained OR the overflow would go, transparently, to other artists I supprted, like runoff voting. I don't like the feeling of throwing money to already-popular people if they're already earning enough. I know my local food shelf needs to help, and many other causes that align with my values.
lakomen 3y ago
"Attention dumbasses" If you want to be taken seriously don't write like a 12 year old rebelragetard. I also stopped reading there. Scrolled down, an endless wall of text that served no purpose than for the writer to vent their frustration.
patcheung 3y ago
This feels more like a discussion on how to compete with Stripe and Paypal.

265 points by rwmj 3y ago

Discord could eat Patreon’s lunch overnight if they wanted to. Every Patreon I’ve been interested in was just a paywall for a Discord community.

kro 3y ago
Discord has already started integrating their own payment for content/channels recently. https://discord.com/serversubscriptions https://discord.com/serversubscriptions
- squigz 3y ago
  And they desperately need to roll it out to more countries... sad Canadian noises
diggan 3y ago
Funny, none of the Patreons I'm subscribing to or been interested in, has been paywalls for Discord communities.
- corbezzoli 3y ago
  Same, I only hear about Patreon on YouTube.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    Fiction authors are who I give my patron money to.
- stinkytaco 3y ago
  Half of them provide discord access and 75% a custom rss feed for a subscriber only podcast in my list. And frankly, I only take advantage of a couple of those. Mostly I just do it to throw a few dollars to stuff I like and don't use the perks. I can't be the only one.
  - scantron4 3y ago
    This for me. I don't use patreon perks for the people I support on an ongoing basis. I have subscribed for perks (templates for some productivity tool) and then unsubscribed a couple of months later, but that wasn't an ongoing creator I watch all the time. I guess getting my SMBC comics by email is convenient but I already have an RSS feed reader and early access isn't important.
- fortran77 3y ago
  All the Patreons I subscribe to are YouTubers (Big Clive, Technology Connections, etc.)

escritor-ai 3y ago

[flagged]

thriftwy 3y ago

[flagged]

hknmtt 3y ago

I am actually developing a platform to compete with pateon. And the author is quite naive in his complaints. You cannot do business and be anonymous. The tax man would eat you alive. At least outside of USA. You also need a license as sole proprietor or be incorporated as a company in order to make repetitive sales and not one-offs. So again, no anonymity whatsoever. "by works" payment model is illegal. You can receive donations or have subscriptions or pay per view but you cannot "maybe deliver", "deliver maybe one work, maybe ten". Again, illegal as fuck. "Non quid pro quo patronage" - again, donations solve this. They are legal and easy without any hustle, as long as the payee is aware what is the purpose of that payment. "api / audience relation system" - well, i am trying to run a business, why in the world would i give api access to third parties without being able to monetize it? each api call costs me resources. nothing is free. not to mention that giving access to api might go against my financial business altogether by moving some financial transactions out of my business into foreign business that is monetizing my api. Author is very naive in his complaints in general. The red tape you have to go through these days for a simple(it's not a rocket science) website is astronomical. The technological issues(like finding a bank with an actual api that works and does not charge you per payment is close to impossible) too are unending hurdles being thrown at you form left and right and the bigtech-monopolized internet does not want you in it competing with their services or NOT using their services and infrastructure to build yours. You think streaming video is free? Try finding a place to host the video and send it over the network for amount that your income can cover and allow you still to make a profit. Good luck. Yes, i have solved all these issues. But it is so damn hard, that these complaints don't even scratch the surface of how impossible it is to start something serious in this monopolized era of the internet and red tape. You just have no idea. You don't.

raincole 3y ago
If someone thinks they can have a competitive edge against existing market leader by 1) have an API 2) make UI faster, they probably lived in an echo chamber for too long and really need to spend more time with non-developer people. Perhaps their other points are valid. Admittedly I don't know enough to tell.
jaggederest 3y ago

x0x0 3y ago

I think the real answer may be that patreon is, actually, a bad business; and that nobody has cracked microtransactions. Separately, while Patreon's charging changes seem boneheaded, I'd guess at least a 50% chance that they weren't driven by stupidity but rather by a CFO having a come to jesus conversation with the e-team. Driven by the fact that microtransactions run on a credit card are tough. Their giant raises make more sense if they were eating a ton of fees in an attempt to hold out for scale where enough people (eg I spend $20-ish/mo on patreon) charge enough money that the 5% covers the processing fees.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
raincole 3y ago
The author starts the article with "take Patreon's lunch money". What lunch? The one VCs fed them? Is Patreon even profitable?
- Applejinx 3y ago
  See, this is what immediately turned me off the article. I don't WANT a payment system that is about beating up other payment systems in the schoolyard and making them cry. I want a payment system that takes money on my behalf and then pays me with it. I'll put up with a lot of inefficiency if it's boring and predictable. You're gonna have a heck of a time prying me away from Patreon in favor of your new lunch-money taking payment system with crypto and hookers. If you're leading with 'take their lunch money', I don't trust you. I don't trust Jack Conte THAT much, but it's sure a lot more than you.
  - chiefalchemist 3y ago
    To your point, it's foolish to pick a fight with a grizzly bear (i.e., Patroen). It's smarter to ask: where is there a market not being fulfilled? Then if that goes well enough eventually *maybe* you look to square off with the grizz. But to run into the sprawling plenty of room forest intentionally looking for a gizzly? That's foolish.

KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago

OP missed the elephant in the room. Patreon is the only platform that allows you to launder softcore (nothing explicit from in front of a camera) NSFW content with legitimate payments. There is an incredible amount of erotic artwork, drawings etc. that are sold through Patreon instead of having to resort to niche adult video site payment processors.

egypturnash 3y ago
Subscribestar has successfully pivoted from "Patreon but you can post right-wing propaganda" to "Patreon but with less restrictions on horny stuff". Patreon is slowly but surely becoming more hostile to horny stuff; right now I'm in the middle of going around with their support over horny creators having to provide some additional identity verification through a third-party site that isn't working on my computer or my phone.
- kodra 3y ago
  The issue is that "less restrictions on horny stuff" means "more restrictions from payment processors" nowadays. Doubly so if you're a Russian platform like Subscribestar is.
  - egypturnash 3y ago
    hahahhaa Subscribestar is Russian? Well that's gonna be fun for all the furry artists posting super-gay stuff on there once it gets big enough for the Russian government to notice.
    - hknmtt 3y ago
      Yes, but they operate from american llc.
    - jowea 3y ago
      Wonder if they will care if it's mostly a foreign audience.

charcircuit 3y ago

There are patreon competitors. Just none of them have a pay by work feature. Consumers likely prefer a predictable expense so there isn't that much of a demand to do it that way.

FoeNyx 3y ago
The post mentions Tipeee but it "charges 8%" and has "invasive personal documentation requirements". Seems Tipeee is based in Paris, so the cumbersomeness may be related to EU regulations.
BlueTemplar 3y ago
There are, Tipeee is one as the author edited in. > Part of what made Patreon explosively successful, in the first place, was that Patreon had apparently cracked the code on one of the hardest problems on the internet: micropayments. > By the time Patreon had come along people had been discussing the problem of micropayments on the internet for at least two decades. I guess the author missed the years where Flattr buttons were popping up on every website, blog, and even comment ? Flattr 1.0 seems to have been killed by a combination of the 2013 Twitter APIpocalypse, being €-first, and not being based in the Silicon Valley : https://blog.hsnyc.co/post/flattr-works/ https://blog.hsnyc.co/post/flattr-works/ https://thenextweb.com/news/flattr-twitter-payments-ban https://thenextweb.com/news/flattr-twitter-payments-ban Then Flattr 2.0 tried again : https://www.engadget.com/2017-10-24-adblock-plus-relaunches-flattr.html https://www.engadget.com/2017-10-24-adblock-plus-relaunches-... And I doubt that Flattr was even the first to do the "bundling" trick, heck this is probably also what made the Minitel so successful ? But as you can see it works in the opposite way : the patrons set a specific sum of money to be distributed each month, which then gets redistributed depending on their engagement with some or other creator (which you can decide to manually boost).
- kalleboo 3y ago
  > I guess the author missed the years where Flattr buttons were popping up on every website, blog, and even comment ? I mean I sure did. When Flattr was announced I loved the idea, and promised that I'd sign up the second I saw a flattr button on a blog post I liked. I never once saw a Flattr button outside of brokep's own blog.

Raed667 3y ago

Highly relevant video: The Rise (and Fall) of Patreon - Tom Nicholas https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mXyN3-gQwJw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mXyN3-gQwJw

kapp_in_life 3y ago
Only got halfway through this video. While it's interesting I find it exhausting how much he singly focuses on the VC financing. This is a classic case of mismanagement by senior management & overly optimistic decisions by the C level staff. Nobody forced them to take on that funding, and clearly it helped them in early stages to grow their company and outcompete the companies with less funding(subbable, etc.) which he handwaves away. Honestly this is the reason I generally ignore these types of video essays, the people who make them generally have the most lazy criticisms that always end up pointing to the same boogeymen(VC, capitalism, US, etc.)
- slikrick 3y ago
  on the contrary, it's completely unsurprising that the literal only critique to be found of the video on HN (a site made by and for VC) to write off the entire video because of one of the errors. maybe reflect inwards a bit more

mattdesl 3y ago

Crypto could provide a competitive edge to certain features in Patreon (and Bandcamp). - Instead of 4-7% payment processing fees, it can be effectively zero[1] - Instead of 8-12% fees (or 15% in case of Bandcamp), crypto industry standards tend to be in the 0-5% range. It’s not always clear to me as a creator and patron why such a significant amount of value needs to be captured for a digital asset sale. - Users of the platform could be given more control such as forking the OSS protocol if the core devs go off the rails or try to extract more than what users feel it’s worth. This is especially interesting given the recent polarizing changes to Patreon and Bandcamp’s business structures. - Settlement times can be measured in minutes or hours rather than days, weeks, or months. - Anonymity and local-first data privacy could be achieved, at least theoretically. Practically, very few L2s have yet to reach complete privacy using zero knowledge proofs and related cryptography. - Mitigating centralizing factors such as Patreon’s control over what is a morally acceptable revenue stream. Content like NSFW art might be currently acceptable, but this could change on a dime if the company decides to change its values. Subscription and recurring payments are notoriously difficult in crypto, but “by-work” as the author puts it, i.e. “microtransactions per each published digital object” is already happening in crypto and with much lower rates than Patreon et al[2]. [1] https://l2fees.info/ https://l2fees.info/ [2] https://teia.art/about https://teia.art/about

pjc50 3y ago
The real feature of centralized services is anti-fraud. Conversely, the real service of crypto is easy to commit, hard to trace, irreversible fraud. (also, you've missed all the points in the original article which crypto does not provide!)
- mattdesl 3y ago
  I did address both the OP's 1) pseudonym (anonymity) and 2) by-works, the other two points (patronage and audience relationship + API) are both viable and already very much present in crypto art communities. The real feature of crypto is decentralization, which does not need to mean fraud—in the same way that end-to-end encryption does not only facilitate criminal behaviour.

6stringmerc 3y ago

Still never got answers how Jack and Pomplamoose got away with the “Beat It” cover video that propelled him upward. Still seems shady. Still will never go near anything endorses or touched by Amanda Palmer.

bennettbackward 3y ago
What did they get away with? Is there some drama around that cover?
maleldil 3y ago
What's wrong with the cover? What's your issue with Amanda Palmer?
mschuetz 3y ago
It's a great cover...what do you mean with "get away with"?

exizt88 3y ago

Anyone who has tried to build a pay-by-work model for digital creators knows that it’s simply an awful business model. There just isn’t that much demand for creator work. And there are no “whales” among these customers to compensate. No one’s buying 10 copies of a math explainer video.

chiefalchemist 3y ago
Yes and no. It's similar - exact? - to the music industry or Hollywood. *Lots* of frogs to kiss and an occasional unicorn. The platforms would be wise to have reoccurring revenue from the dreamers, and also backend points on the unicorns. In general, in 2023+ the biggest problem seems to be signal to noise ratio. There so much content being scattered about, it's increasing more difficult to find quality. More and more (personal) resources are lost to getting past the noise. There's less time and energy left for the quality.
ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
If you can find a niche it can work. My friend built his own website to sell his erotic art.
- mkmk 3y ago
  How do smaller creators manage payments in the adult space? I thought it was impossible.
  - ThrowawayTestr 3y ago
    PayPal. All the risque stuff is behind the paywall. Home page of the website gives no indication of what's within.
    - kevinmchugh 3y ago
      Given all the horror stories of locked PayPal accounts your friend would be well served too transfer money out of that account as frequently as possible.

wslh 3y ago

I am really interested in the space. A friend has launched https://www.imgrateful.io/ https://www.imgrateful.io/ and I think crypto (beyond all criticism that we can do) is an interesting option for tipping and receiving donations without the annoying friction of Paypal(s).

manchmalscott 3y ago
Doesn’t crypto have a gas fee or something that would cost more than most micropayments to begin with?
- swaptr 3y ago
  not on the lightning network
  - idiotsecant 3y ago
    Let's not start down this road unless we want a detailed discussion of why the lightning network is hopium and fantasy that has fundamental basic routing flaws obvious to anyone who's built anything at scale.
    - mandmandam 3y ago
      Can we start down the road of block-lattice tech, which has been running fast, safe and free for like seven years now? It's tiresome hearing about crypto's fees, eco, and mining problems while there's a proven technology that's actually spam resistant and nearly consumer-grade actively working, right now.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  Depends on the currency, IIRC with Monero the fee is like a tenth or a hundredth of a cent.
- wslh 3y ago
  There are technologies that does not suffer from the fee issue. Here I don't want to start a crypto war. We can even forget about the crypto charged word and think about stable coins, points and/or tokens that could be changed. I used the example of crypto just to emphasize that the current financial methods are very expensive and compliance crazy to process basic donations to developers and/or other creative endeavours. The typical "the righteous pays for the sinner".

teekert 3y ago

There are BTC lighting payments and the podcasting 2.0 movement to compete with Patreon. Mostly for podcasts and music atm but that will change.

olah_1 3y ago
The biggest proof to me that nobody uses Monero is that something as simple as proving payments is like pulling teeth. Yes, you can go into advanced settings and copy a payment proof. But then how do you get it to a retailer? What does the retailer do with it. It's not part of the normal consumer flow use case, and that tells me that people still think of it like a toy and not a serious tool.
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  Generally people use Monero just to hide the connection between two wallets on BTC/ETH. Either for money laundering or just privacy. I don't see why you'd need it here, where you are purchasing something legal but unpopular with payment processors.
  - olah_1 3y ago
    Why would anyone want to avoid the panopticon if what they are doing is legal? Leaving a trail of metadata on everything you do is just not always desirable. In terms of privacy, I don’t see using Monero as different from using Cash.
    - sebzim4500 3y ago
      Sure, I just mean that you don't need to directly do the payment in XMR. You can use monero to hide the provenance of your BTC/ETH/something faster without having to go through the pain of proving an XMR transfer.
    - nscalf 3y ago
      I think the caveat here for people doing something legal is the questionable future status of crypto. Countries have completely outlawed holding them before, I’d rather just not have it tied to my name if there’s any risk of it becoming illegal, if there were a feasible option.

mannyv 3y ago

There's a lot of talk about tipping, consumers, etc. Being a Patron (which is what Patreon was trying to do) traditionally meant supporting someone, no matter what their output. If your tortured genius put out one work a year, so be it. If they popped out Sunflowers then even better! There doesn't have to be any quid pro quo at all. It's what we now call Basic Income financed by someone's surplus. Don't overthink it. It's not a tip, it's a gift, an expression of support. It may be something more, but in the end you're giving money to someone, period. As an aside, it's really unclear if Patreon payments should be considered income in the US. It's a gift, but it's up to the giver to handle that. I doubt creators would need a 1099 in that case either.

wlesieutre 3y ago
When Patreon is structured as “For $5/month you get X, for $10/month you get Y, for $15/month you get Z” can you really argue it’s a gift? It’s very transactional.
- efdee 3y ago
  I'm not sure how representative my personal data point is, but I don't really pay attention to the perks. I pick a tier based on how much money I want to send their way.
  - Loughla 3y ago
    I'm not sure the IRS cares about your intent. I feel like the structure is important.
- yayitswei 3y ago
  Yes but those rewards are rarely fungible. As I understand it's more about recognizing the patron (e.g. your name in the credits) and giving them special status in the community (e.g. early access) rather than getting something of real monetary value.
sebzim4500 3y ago
Almost all succesful creators on Patreon give you benefits for subscribing (early access to content, behind the scenes, etc.), so I don't see how you could possibly convince the IRS that it's a gift.

jp57 3y ago

I think it's cute that he thinks someone could build and maintain well all the things he wants for less than 5% in commission and also not pass along processing fees, on what he admits is a micropayment processor. That said, I don't understand the motivation for Patreon's decision to stop bundling payments, unless they're being forced to by issuing banks or payment processors for some reason. EDIT: Thinking about it more, I suspect it has to do with fraud detection and prevention. A site like Patreon is at high risk to be a place to siphon money from stolen cards: Create some fake artists and have a bunch of fake patrons pledge to them using stolen cards. This kind of scam is likely much harder to detect and prevent with bundling, when multiple fake artists can be mixed in with some real ones in a single charge. I think many people don't realize that when an online payment is charged back for fraud, the merchant (Patreon, in this case) is liable for the charges, not the issuing bank. (Well, there are some instances where liability can be shifted to the issuer, but they're not that common.) High chargeback rates can also result in higher fees for the merchant. And of course the effort to detect, prevent, and remediate the fraud has to be paid for out of Patreon's commissions, in addition to everything else.

culi 3y ago
Liberapay is a popular FLOSS alternative that runs solely on people donating to them through their own platform. They make ~$790 a week currently https://liberapay.com/Liberapay/ https://liberapay.com/Liberapay/ Ko-Fi is a proprietary example with 0% donation fees. They make money through a "Gold" offering and through a 5% fee on non-donation income. And they're successful enough to be hiring right now: https://more.ko-fi.com/careers https://more.ko-fi.com/careers
notpachet 3y ago
> I don't understand the motivation for Patreon's decision to stop bundling payments The way I understand it, the motivation is that they're losing money on bundled microtransactions until customers cross some monthly threshold (let's say that's the $14.29 mentioned in the article). So let's say a customer has a $1 monthly subscription to Creator A, and another $1 subscription to Creator B, adding up to a bundled $2 monthly charge to their credit card. That's apparently below the price point where the provider is able to offset the processing fees. Whereas if they have two separate $1 charges, that reduces the loss somehow (I'm not a payment processing expert and I didn't read the fine print that the author posted, so I don't understand exactly why that's the case.) I wonder if the "solution" would be for Patreon to have a minimum subscription model, where each customer is guaranteed to pay, each month, an amount that's above the threshold required for Patreon to avoid a loss on processing fees. You sign up as a patron, and you're automatically dinged $15/mo as long as your account is active. You can choose to route those $15 to whatever creators you want, and you'll see a single line item on your bill. And then obviously you can exceed that threshold if you want to support more creators.

kmeisthax 3y ago

There's one root cause for most, if not all of the things mentioned about Patreon in this post: Jack Conte took VC money. Neophilia is a progressive and incurable disease of venture capital. VCs aren't looking to build sustainable, profitable businesses. They are looking to buy entire market segments for later enshittification. Your job as a founder of a company asking for VC money is to construct a parallel state around your target market so that you can charge taxes on everyone in that market and that the VCs can sell the entire market to someone else for a huge profit (the "exit"). Jack Conte is very firmly an artist, and not a walking pile of technofeudalist money, so I can't help but look at this as a deal-with-the-devil scenario. Or at the very least, someone desperately trying and failing to keep the money on track. The VCs bought a payment bundler and want to turn it into a merch vendor, website host, etc.

hbarka 3y ago
I wonder when Varoufakis’ introduction of the word technofeudalist got into the techie vernacular.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  For me it was a few weeks ago when Cory Doctorow posted a review of Varoufakis' book.
- ajkjk 3y ago
  Personally I read about the book and immediately thought, "yes, this is one of the words we've been needing", and then started telling friends about it.
notabennett 3y ago
Yes, and: Patreon is, at its core, a professional services provider for large YouTube artists. That's the segment it's best at supporting and the segment that needs it the most. But its valuation is based on the idea that it's going to capture some percentage of the entire creator economy. I do think there are some specific details about Patreon's history and leadership that make it unusually bad at running an engineering organization, even for a VC-backed startup. It has some deceptively hard engineering problems and has struggled to attract, retain, and use technical leadership equal to those problems.

karaterobot 3y ago

I don't know how common it is, but Patreon's biggest selling point to me is that I already have an account there. If there was a ton of competition, with creators I help support going to ten different platforms, I don't think I would follow them—certainly not all of them. I want as few companies as possible to have my billing information, and (all else equal) I'd prefer if that company had been around for a while. That's Patreon. And the centralization works for creators, too. I have several times discovered a creator on Patreon whose work I already appreciated, but who had not done a good job of communicating that they even had a Patreon, so I never knew about it. I only found them by accident, and pledged money to them, just because I was already on Patreon. 5% + 5% is a lot (10% if my math is right), but I'm not sure where artists get a better deal these days, at least on the internet. Further, the Patreon interface sucks for users, and I'm sure it sucks even more for creators who have to engage with it more frequently. But, not so bad that I, personally, am looking to find another alternative.

ramesh31 3y ago

Patreon (and all its competitors) at its core is a payments company. You don't compete with them by building a better front end product. You compete with them by building a more efficient payments engine with a higher margin, not tied to any third parties beyond a bank directly.

squirrel 3y ago

Micropayments, fraud, alternative transaction models — this would be a perfect topic for @patio11 . Would love to see a bits about money newsletter on this.

fluxem 3y ago

I'm not convinced by the arguments. Do the majority of creators want anonymity? I don't think so. They can set up a company and hide behind it if they do. Being an anonymous platform invites tax evasion and money laundering. Do you really want to deal with that? Why would I open up an API so that competitors can swoop in? What benefit that would provide to me? No one will use API over UI. The author clearly wants a donation platform that caters to a very niche group of users. I would guess there are less than 100 people in the world who want it (and do not need it)

TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
How would the API described help competitors? If I, as a creator, want to set up "Patrons of level X have access to this section of my website", and I build against the Patreon API to achieve that, surely that embeds me more in the Patreon ecosystem, not less?
lolinder 3y ago
> Do the majority of creators want anonymity? I don't think so. They can set up a company and hide behind it if they do. Being an anonymous platform invites tax evasion and money laundering. Do you really want to deal with that? You're completely misunderstanding their argument about pseudonymity. Patreon isn't magically exempt from KYC, they do have the real life identity of the creator. There's no legal reason why the patrons need to know everything that the company knows. From the article: > What that actually means is the platform has to allow creators (the people who charge money) to be pseudonymous (to use their stage name or pen names) in all of their interactions with their patrons (the people paying the money), and the platform, which is legally required to know the legal identity of the creator and have on file their relevant tax ID numbers (e.g. SSN in the US), needs to keep that legal identity confidential.

tunesmith 3y ago

I wonder if you could make headway by requiring a minimum $15/month from patrons, to make it profitable after processing fees (assuming the $14.29 hypothesis is correct). Aside from the folks you want to directly patronize, the rest would go into a long-tail slush fund. I guess that would chase away the vast majority of the people that really do only want to donate $3/month or whatever though...

hoofhearted 3y ago

Would anyone be interested in a self hosted version of what Patreon offers for creators? I have been working on a free Wordpress alternative that is built with React, and removes the guard rails and burdens for creators that WP creates. https://github.com/elegantframework/elegant-cli https://github.com/elegantframework/elegant-cli I have had requests to include Twitch like features such as tipping, subscriptions, and power ups. I started planning out these features to get them into the development pipeline and I realized that some of these features are the value that Patreon creates. Would developers/creators be interested in having subscription tiers, tips, power ups, rewards, etc, on their own website alongside their content? I am currently working with a local creator who recently switched over to us; and we are piloting ways to level up his content on his domain by linking his Patreon account. But as the author of the article mentioned, this creator goes by a stage name when he’s connecting with fans. https://mankini.tv/ https://mankini.tv/ https://mankini.tv/interviews/mankini-interviews-buzz-osborne-of-the-melvins https://mankini.tv/interviews/mankini-interviews-buzz-osborn...

hoofhearted 3y ago
I got downvotted lol.. I'll take that as a "Yes, build it" from the haters. I'll set up a payment gateway with Stripe and whitelabel their subscription service to offer content creators a Patreon like experience on their own website, and post a SHOW HN for feedback. Stay tuned : )
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

zem 3y ago

the section on "non quid pro quo" patronage perfectly sums up what i want out of the site, to the extent that i never even log in to look at "patrons-only" stuff. i pay to support artists who are sharing things with the world, so that they can continue to do so.

Razengan 3y ago

By the way, regarding software, why isn't "donationware" more of a thing? i.e. release the base product at a low price (or for free) and just give an option for users who really like it to donate you whatever they want, however many times they want.

meristohm 3y ago

I would more-readily give money to support artists if they were very transparent about their finances and how much they wanted to earn. Say my (made up) target is $50,000 a year, and if my patrons reached this goal, any further donations would cause everyone's to decrease so the ceiling was maintained OR the overflow would go, transparently, to other artists I supprted, like runoff voting. I don't like the feeling of throwing money to already-popular people if they're already earning enough. I know my local food shelf needs to help, and many other causes that align with my values.

lakomen 3y ago

"Attention dumbasses" If you want to be taken seriously don't write like a 12 year old rebelragetard. I also stopped reading there. Scrolled down, an endless wall of text that served no purpose than for the writer to vent their frustration.

patcheung 3y ago

This feels more like a discussion on how to compete with Stripe and Paypal.