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Comment by shabble | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't there something recently about Patreon having problems (legal/regulatory) with the way they were bundling all the contributions for a user and only submitting a single card/processor transaction for the total?

If so, that might explain why they want to effectively unbundle everything again, even if it makes everything worse for everyone.

The marketing-weasel language of their "robust question and answer page"[1] is a little hard to take regardless of actual reason though.

[1] https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005631963-W...

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It's perfectly acceptable from a legal and regulatory standpoint for a merchant (Patreon) to bundle together several small charges into a single transaction for efficiency; Apple and Amazon both do this for digital purchases.

The payments to creators are a separate series of transactions. If using ACH, there should be minimal fees.

On the one hand, Patreon probably needs to charge more to meet its costs. On the other hand, it's doing so in an incredibly poorly-conceived and messaged fashion.

Well if that's the case it'd be better for them to say "we do such and such because law requires us to do so", no?

Do you recall which rule/law required unbundling of charges?

no, I'm just going from a fairly hazy memory of some article, so it may not be the case at all.

Could also have been something contractual with the payment processors relating to fraud detection or prohibited item/services, but it seemed like it might threaten their current payment setup.

I'll see if I can find anything, but something in the firefox 56-57->52 ESR downgrade appears to have eaten all of my profile's History, and I'm not sure I can be bothered rummaging through external backups :)

Found this: https://subfictional.com/my-theory-patreon-doesnt-want-to-be...

This is most likely due to EU's new PSD2 regulations (see https://stripe.com/connect/eu-guide)

If you ride the guide in its entirety (or the text of the PSD2 at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX...), you would see that one-to-many transactions are fine under the PSD2 regulations.

The most likely reason for the change in fee structures is that Patreon simply needs to charge more money.

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