I have discovered some Paypal Alternatives lately, and I wonder if these services like Payoneer, Skrill, or Google's payment services are as good as PayPal's when it comes to commissioning, especially for the folks who want to expand their payment range and those who wants to avoid the scent of South African muskrat who is stepping down his role on the blue bird app?

Thoughts and recommendations?

alexyorim said:
South African muskrat

Yikes

xanlurk said:
Yikes

He has a severe case of MDS. Prognosis negative.

Skipping on Musk and focusing on the topic.
Bumping on this.

Also, quick question for commission pricing, is $20 a bit too high for a full color pic for a beginner?

alexyorim said:
Skipping on Musk and focusing on the topic.
Bumping on this.

Also, quick question for commission pricing, is $20 a bit too high for a full color pic for a beginner?

I still don't have a good idea of proper art pricing, but in my opinion I would say $20 is pretty fair for a full color finished picture, in the same style of your pictures prior to post #2712518

I didn't see many backgrounds in your recent images so I can't properly formulate my opinion on your background skill, but I feel that you draw characters well worth $20 or more.

I wouldn't call you a begginer, since you're already quite good at the drawing fundamentals as far as I can see. Instead, I'd call you an amateur+ or experienced-amateur instead, there may be a better word, but I can not recall which one it is.

alexyorim said:
I have discovered some Paypal Alternatives lately, and I wonder if these services like Payoneer, Skrill, or Google's payment services are as good as PayPal's when it comes to commissioning, especially for the folks who want to expand their payment range and those who wants to avoid the scent of South African muskrat who is stepping down his role on the blue bird app?

Thoughts and recommendations?

I've heard good things about Payoneer at least. Google Pay is kind of weird to use now and I don't think it can be used internationally, if that's a concern. There's also no reason you can't use multiple services; they'll pretty much babysit themselves and it offers that many more options for people to use.

alexyorim said:
Skipping on Musk and focusing on the topic.
Bumping on this.

Also, quick question for commission pricing, is $20 a bit too high for a full color pic for a beginner?

Post examples. While I can see your commission guide I think it would be more helpful to show examples of what commissions look like, as these types of guides aren't really very informative on their own. A lot of furry artists charge way too little for their work and I'd like to help you avoid doing the same.

m3g4p0n1 said:
I wouldn't call you a beginner, since you're already quite good at the drawing fundamentals as far as I can see. Instead, I'd call you an amateur+ or experienced-amateur instead, there may be a better word, but I can not recall which one it is.

I need to clarify myself when it comes to "beginner". "Beginner" in the sense of art pricing.

ratte said:
Post examples. While I can see your commission guide I think it would be more helpful to show examples of what commissions look like, as these types of guides aren't really very informative on their own. A lot of furry artists charge way too little for their work and I'd like to help you avoid doing the same.

Do you have any tips on how. I also don't want to overprice my work as well.

kora_viridian said:
If you're in the US, any Walmart will pay you at least $12 an hour to put boxes on shelves. It doesn't matter if you like Walmart or not, or if you like putting boxes on shelves or not. That's the going rate for a job that just about anybody can do.

So, if a picture takes you three hours total to do - I mean the whole process, like, talking to the client, thinking about it, looking at references, sketching, coloring, scanning (if needed), uploading - then you should charge at least $36. Probably more, because making a decent-looking drawing is not something anybody can do, but at least that.

I'm not from the US, and I had been advised that I had I need to price my commissions through time, resolution, and materials. As I tend to procrastinate and I suck at time management, I might need a bit of advice if I include pricing from the times I procrastinate.

If you want help with figuring out how much to ask for you should consider timing yourself on how long you work and then calculate what you'd like your hourly wage to be for various steps.

As an example I use toggl.com to track my own work hours, it's basically a fancy stop watch app that automatically collects and displays your work chunks throughout the day and you can then look at them for your own entertainment, or use it to bill them to an entity. For this example the easiest way for you to figure out how much time you actually spend on anything would be to download the thing, sit down to make an example commission for the price sheet, and time yourself on every step.
Start the first timer for sketch phase (call it something like sketch or whatever) until you're happy with it, stop the timer. Make a new timer (line work or whatever) do the line work, stop it again after you're happy with the lines, and so on until you're done with everything. Once you have a list of times you can either add everything up to figure out how much time you spent in total, plus how much every step by itself took.
Then just multiply that by whatever you'd like your hourly rate to be and you've got a total what that commission would cost.

Note, you can also just use the stopwatch function on your phone for that and an excel / open office sheet for the same calculation. But unless you know how much time you spend on the various aspects of an image you're going to live with guesswork on how much you value your own time and skills.

I was thinking of making a similar post myself sometime soon, so thought I'd post here.

Most payment sites say you can't use their services for explicit material/porn, and it'd be nice to find one that's fine with it just so you know you won't have your account blocked. While googling I found https://arty.ooo/ and was going to ask if anybody here had heard of or used them. It doesn't sound too bad at least, they charge 8% but using a paypal transaction calculator commissions would work out about the same.

pup said:
I was thinking of making a similar post myself sometime soon, so thought I'd post here.

Most payment sites say you can't use their services for explicit material/porn, and it'd be nice to find one that's fine with it just so you know you won't have your account blocked. While googling I found https://arty.ooo/ and was going to ask if anybody here had heard of or used them. It doesn't sound too bad at least, they charge 8% but using a paypal transaction calculator commissions would work out about the same.

I hadn't even heard of the .OOO TLD until just now.

lance_armstrong said:
I hadn't even heard of the .OOO TLD until just now.

Thinking about it, I hadn't either.

kora_viridian said:
I've never tried to get paid for art with PayPal. The thing I saw artists talking about, during the last round of "Paypal bans everyone" a couple of years ago, was that it helped to send the commissioner an invoice through Paypal, saying something generic like "Contracted work". With an invoice, the commissioner only had the option to pay it or not, and couldn't add a comment.

I've also heard of people saying they haven't recieved their commissioned art, when they have, and even when the artist provides screenshots PayPal usually sides with the commissioner regardless.

kora_viridian said:
Using Paypal's "transfer money" path, which lets the commissioner type in something like "Payment for full color art of SexyFox69 riding five dragon cocks", was claimed to be more likely to get you banned. The implication was that Paypal was reading the payment reasons, either manually or with automation. I don't know if the current "best practice" is different.

Yeah, that's how I heard a lot of artists lost their account.

kora_viridian said:
I've never heard of Arty. I looked at their page and it looks like they use Wise (formerly TransferWise) as the back end. [..]

However, the default way it wanted to work was for me to give TransferWise my bank account login and password so they could log in and take the money out of my account. [..]

I don't know if Wise still works this way. [..] I think TransferWise had to go through the same change, at least judging by the "we've updated our terms" emails I still get.

In Arty's terms and conditions it mentions that they also use Stripe, which doesn't need your bank login, so I imagine that Wise was updated as well at some point like you say.

kora_viridian said:
Also, the last time I looked, PayPal was around $0.80 + 2.9%, at least for certain transactions. The "send an invoice" or "business" rate might be higher; I don't know.

I saw that, though I think the business invoice rate is 10%, but they also add extra fees for currency conversion. Using Wise's paypal calculator it ended up being about the same, which I'd presume is reasonably trustworthy.

ratte said:
Post examples. While I can see your commission guide I think it would be more helpful to show examples of what commissions look like, as these types of guides aren't really very informative on their own. A lot of furry artists charge way too little for their work and I'd like to help you avoid doing the same.

I took your advice. Now all I need is to have a bit of effort to self-promote, right?

pup said:
Most payment sites say you can't use their services for explicit material/porn, and it'd be nice to find one that's fine with it just so you know you won't have your account blocked.

Using cryptocurrencies for explicit material/porn might be a better idea than using a payment site. Cryptocurrencies don't have any restrictions because of how they work.

electricitywolf said:
Using cryptocurrencies for explicit material/porn might be a better idea than using a payment site. Cryptocurrencies don't have any restrictions because of how they work.

Crypto would work as it (mostly) is decentralized, that however comes with a plethora of other issues.
Namely stigma around cryptocurrencies, support across websites (What vendors accept crypto as payment), willingness for your commissioner to use these currencies, what currencies you would want to "support" as payment, and so on.
Cryptocurrencies solve the issue of "Payment processor doesn't allow me to do X", but introduces a ton of other complexities.
I would strongly recommend against going down the crypto route if you want to be serious about commission work, or unless you are already a big artist.

Well crypto definitely don't have restrictions so you could choose it. Unfortunately i know that not many people use them, because not many can afford to buy them, or simply don't understand how they work. But for me it is not a problem, cause i can easily buy or sell https://kuna.io/en/ my crypto at any time, by using some platforms. And yes i always seek for crypto with the highest sell values of course. Overall i think that crypto is still like dark horse for many people and this explains why it is unstable. But i hope that in future it will change

grekko said:
Well crypto definitely don't have restrictions so you could choose it.

Unless they stabilize their currency and remove their negative stigma, that's a no for me.

Just mail money orders/cash? (joking, kinda)
They force porn off the most popular platform, then SHOCK, porn goes to less desirable platforms, rinse and repeat until platforms don't want to allow porn because 'risky' (more like reputation). They claim it's chargebacks and fraud, but I have to wonder if it's not some modern-day version of redlining by banks. Business type is not a protected class, so it's fully legal even if they're effectively monopolies.

Ugh. That's why the generic "Art Commission" is most used when it comes to these.

Anyway,
# Uploaded my Commission Info. What do you think? Do I need to bump it once in a while?
# My brother had mentioned Ko-fi . I think artists I follow use that site as an Patreon alternative or additive. Should I start a Ko-fi or something similar to get passive income?

My goal this year is to get $150 to start my own Paypal account. Likely to but a scanner, art supplies or games on Steam. Is it too modest or too out there for that amount of money?

chirmaya said:
Just some tips for if you are planning to use PayPal.
1) Use invoices rather than just letting anyone send you money. Without using this feature, people can leave comments about what they paid for, and those get flagged in their system if they reference anything NSFW.
2) Do not leave your money in your PayPal account. Move it out each time you pass the $100 mark. This is because PayPal can lock your account for any reason they wish and take up to... it used to be $3.5k, but it might be more nowadays. But if they lock it, you aren't getting it back without spending $10k+ on lawyers.

So, just like crypto, don't use a corrupt organization like PayPal unless you have no better options.

Paypal has always been skirting the line. I remember the controversy over them pretending they weren't operating like a bank. The double-fees system on eBay and so on. The grabbing-your-money part was just icing on the cake. XD

I thought GumRoad was a good option but apparently they can be pretty twitchy as well if you get even a small number of chargebacks. Like: 1

alexyorim said:
Unless they stabilize their currency and remove their negative stigma, that's a no for me.

Cryptocurrencies are not stable because there is not enough people using them to buy stuff, most of the transactions are trading of cryptocurrencies (and then people don't want to use them because they are not stable).

What do you mean by stigma?

electricitywolf said:
Cryptocurrencies are not stable because there is not enough people using them to buy stuff, most of the transactions are trading of cryptocurrencies (and then people don't want to use them because they are not stable).

What do you mean by stigma?

Maybe stigma is a strong word because as of now, aside from being unstable, the people who mostly use it are obnoxious techbros, scammers, grifters, bots, and art thieves.

Although with Etherium, they just changed to a proof-of-stake approach, so I dunno how this will change NFTs and eventually art commissions. But this would be a topic for another thread.

Okay, so once again, I have updated it again, and uploaded a new info just to be sure.
Are there any info that I put too little or too much?

Bumping this thread a bit to ask.

What's CashApp? I only know of it after its founder was stabbed to death. Also someone tried to commission me, but they only have CashApp and I only have PayPal. Is CashApp different from PayPal?

alexyorim said:
Bumping this thread a bit to ask.

What's CashApp? I only know of it after its founder was stabbed to death. Also someone tried to commission me, but they only have CashApp and I only have PayPal. Is CashApp different from PayPal?

CashApp is just another payment app like Venmo or Paypal.

rainbow_dash said:
CashApp is just another payment app like Venmo or Paypal.

Similar payment processing to PayPal and CashApp can't be cross-platformed with PayPal?

alexyorim said:
Similar payment processing to PayPal and CashApp can't be cross-platformed with PayPal?

I have no idea. I've used it once or twice to pay for food somewhere that didn't have internet working.

alexyorim said:
Similar payment processing to PayPal and CashApp can't be cross-platformed with PayPal?

Somewhat similar. You don't need to link a bank to send/receive money and CashApp's transfer fees are much lower/practically non-existent compared to PayPal. The only big downsides is that it's limited to only the US and UK, mobile-only, and isn't federally insured. So if someone were to hack into your account or say you sent money to the wrong person, that money gone forever. Thankfully, it's up-to-par with security features. If I had to summarize it, CashApp is great for sending/receiving small transactions, but the accessibility is limited.

thehuskyk9 said:
Somewhat similar. You don't need to link a bank to send/receive money and CashApp's transfer fees are much lower/practically non-existent compared to PayPal. The only big downsides is that it's limited to only the US and UK, mobile-only, and isn't federally insured. So if someone were to hack into your account or say you sent money to the wrong person, that money gone forever. Thankfully, it's up-to-par with security features. If I had to summarize it, CashApp is great for sending/receiving small transactions, but the accessibility is limited.

Figures. I'm neither American nor British, so I'll stick to PayPal until further notice.