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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

This is a pretty terrible excuse. It amounts to: we're overcharging you because we're too lazy to change our billing system.

A reasonable change is to make one charge per month for the total you've pledged. The CC charges for $100 would be $3.25.

No one would object to $3.25 per $100.

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I would not call it "lazy" because that's a direct insult to the human beings, but I have not yet seen a reasonable defense of why they appear to be charging more than Stripe charges them, and encourage folks to seek that when asking Patreon questions about this issue.

EDIT: "why they're" -> "why they appear to be"

Ok, yes that's fair. I shouldn't say lazy.. they could have an actual reason. but in 15 years of handling cc charges for my business, I can't think of a single one.

There's a rumor floating around that Stripe has taken issue with their batching model and that they're being forced to stop batching, which would absolutely justify this change since then Y=X, but I've not been able to find any solid evidence one way or the other about that.

EDIT: I filed a support ticket asking if my 2018-Jan charges will be batched or not. We'll see.

I mean, why wouldn't they say that in the messages they've distributed to creators and patrons, then? If that's the case, they have needlessly caused themselves a tremendous amount of public headache by being disingenuous about the reason behind the change.

Could be due to the coming EU regulations (PSD2) which places much stricter regulations around accepting money on behalf of someone else. See more in https://stripe.com/connect/eu-guide

Maybe they risk being labeled a money transmitter?

For those following up days later, this is what I think as well. Someone else wrote it up:

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

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