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Patreon wants us to think they're Stripe fees, but they're not.

When I pay $17 for my monthly pledges, that comes out of my card as one single transaction, with one single $0.30 Stripe per-transaction fee.

Stripe also offers high-volume clients a discount on the 2.9% rate, which Patreon must be big enough to get.

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> Stripe also offers high-volume clients a discount on the 2.9% rate, which Patreon must be big enough to get.

Yep. They pay 1.9% (source: https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204606125-How-...)

Also, Paypal offers a 5 cents + 5% micropayments rate that they take advantage of.

The 35 cents plus 2.9% is clearly designed to make you think that they are processing fees and I'd be very surprised if Patreon wasn't putting at least half of that into their pocket.

5 cents and 5% is ridiculous if it is cost-plus, but if it is indeed a flat rate, considering how small some of these microtransactions can be, and the overhead involved for a transaction of any size, it starts to make sense.

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