Whole thing is here

Patreon is changing it's payment structure to work as such. Patreon takes its 5% of the pledge, 95% goes to the person you're supporting, and an additional amount of $0.35 is tacked onto the pledge payment.

Short version is that $1 "feel good pledges" are going bye bye as it means that $1 pledges now cost $1.38 for the person pledging. Expect a lot of people to cancel their $1 pledges.

A little more than a quarter is a massive change?

Doomguy666 said:
A little more than a quarter is a massive change?

For a $1 pledge, that's a 35% increase.

Doomguy666 said:
A little more than a quarter is a massive change?

Yes, actually.

Here's a friendly graphic

The gist of it is that before, the creators payed the transaction fees, in one big lump. Now, that fee is being passed on to the patron (the fan)

So that means instead of paying a single transaction fee, the transaction fee is being paid repeatedly.

For the typical one-dollar pledge, the patron gets charged 1.38 and the creator only gets 68% of what was initially charged...

the new system places more value on larger donations, whereas every single patreon artist has said time and time again that even a single dollar is appreciated.

this means donating one dollar to five each is gonna cost more thsn 6 dollars to one. thanks for nothing patreon

Honestly, I think this is less a problem with Patreon and more a problem with our financial system composed of layers and layers of transaction services. I hate Bitcoin for a lot of reasons, but at least with Cryptocurrencies the transaction fees make sense.

This is what happens if you have centralized currency and the banks are allowed to dictate the terms of any transactions.

The "new" fees are standard transaction fees for both PayPal and the Bank of America (as well as basically any other bank out there). There's a bit of wiggle room in there (PayPal only charges 2.9% + 29c for every transaction) but it's still mainly used to deal with these.
Unsurprisingly both the BoA and PayPal absolutely hate small transactions, so now Patreon gets to deal with that phenomenon as well.

I am confused. If I'm pledging $10 to someone's Patreon, how much am I getting charged with this new thing in place?

TheHuskyK9 said:
I am confused. If I'm pledging $10 to someone's Patreon, how much am I getting charged with this new thing in place?

Per infographic above, $10.64 = $10 + $0.35 + $10*2.9%. The creator takes home $9.5 = $10 - $10*5%.

hslugs said:
Per infographic above, $10.64 = $10 + $0.35 + $10*2.9%. The creator takes home $9.5 = $10 - $10*5%.

Oh ok

The change is cancelled.

Granberia said:
The change is cancelled.

I hope this ultimately means good things. I am greatly relieved, for the sake of creators who I hope to continue funding, that the incoming change is cancelled.

I appreciate Patreon's needs as a business, but I dearly hope that they will look at options to batch together transactions and reduce fees for all parties, both for their company's sake and for the sake of creators.

ikdind said:
...I dearly hope that they will look at options to batch together transactions...

But... they are kinda doing this already? Because I'm only taken mony once a month for all the differend kind of pledges.

Mario69 said:
But... they are kinda doing this already? Because I'm only taken mony once a month for all the differend kind of pledges.

They had problems with, basically... you signing up on the 25th, being charged, then being charged again on the 1st.

So they were going to watch it to a system where you pay on the 13th, and pay on the 13th every other month after.

So, if you sign up for things on the 2nd, 7th, 14th 15th and 18th, and the 25th. with the change they were proposing, you would have gotten charged again on the 2nd, 7th, 14th, etc etc. Rather than just the 1st.

(I think, at least.)

SnowWolf said:
They had problems with, basically... you signing up on the 25th, being charged, then being charged again on the 1st.

So they were going to watch it to a system where you pay on the 13th, and pay on the 13th every other month after.

So, if you sign up for things on the 2nd, 7th, 14th 15th and 18th, and the 25th. with the change they were proposing, you would have gotten charged again on the 2nd, 7th, 14th, etc etc. Rather than just the 1st.

(I think, at least.)

But... Pay up front patreons, yes, you would get charged at that point when you first pledge, but after that it will always charge 1st every time after that at the same time with every other pledge, meaning that I'm only taken money once a month in all cases and they get it directly from my debit card, meaning they shouldn't have much any fees attached to them.

So that would be just one time issue when placing the first pledge or with users who are monthly changing their pledges.

And if they were going to make charges based on the day that I did the pledge, that would just skyrocked payment fees and make monthly payments not work the way they should to actual creators.

I admit I haven't looked too much into this, but it all just feels really dum.

Mario69 said:
I admit I haven't looked too much into this, but it all just feels really dum.

It basically was. BUt, here's there blogpost---it might explain what they WERE going to do better.

https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee-structure/

Mario69 said:
But... Pay up front patreons, yes, you would get charged at that point when you first pledge, but after that it will always charge 1st every time after that at the same time with every other pledge, meaning that I'm only taken money once a month in all cases and they get it directly from my debit card, meaning they shouldn't have much any fees attached to them.

So that would be just one time issue when placing the first pledge or with users who are monthly changing their pledges.

And if they were going to make charges based on the day that I did the pledge, that would just skyrocked payment fees and make monthly payments not work the way they should to actual creators.

I admit I haven't looked too much into this, but it all just feels really dum.

I had thought the problem was with folks who would pledge into something with immediate payment, and then cancel after they've gotten ahold of whatever they were pledging for (comic pages, erotic art, game builds, etc). Meaning Patreon's system had no opportunity to batch up transactions, and either reduced payouts to content creators or forced Patreon to absorb a greater fraction of those fees (or both).

From reading their original blog post more carefully, it sounds like it's a mix of that, plus folks who cancel after being surprised by what appears to be a double-billing (once when they start a pledge, once on the 1st of the month which may be the very next day), plus folks who cancel because their first payment to a per-update pledge may be for multiple updates in the past month when the patron saw fewer updates between the start of their pledge and the first payout (i.e. they missed an update earlier in the month but was billed for it anyways).

But still, breaking up every transaction and putting the fees on the patrons is the absolute worst way to resolve that, in my opinion. It's horrendously inefficient for the patron and grossly increases the amount someone pays if they're making many small pledges to a large number of creators, instead of larger payments to fewer creators.

They've gone back and retracted the idea
https://blog.patreon.com/not-rolling-out-fees-change/

fox_whisper85 said:
They've gone back and retracted the idea
https://blog.patreon.com/not-rolling-out-fees-change/

We know.