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Comment by siffland | Hacker News Reader

Amen. Like always it is all about the Benjamin's. They are a for profit business. The best thing you can do is switch to another service with better rates. Most people wont do that.

I currently give $38 a month to 19 creators ($2 each, I don't really have much to give). So that is like what $13 in fees for me. I think not.

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Patreon would only need to bill you once, not sure why they need to add processing fees to each pledge?

Because it lets them extract a lot more cash from their users under the cover of processing fees.

I agree. Without an efficient micropayment system available, I can understand a charge per transaction. But adding a transaction fee to each pledge, when the patron is making one monthly payment, is a bad idea. Maybe they want to get rid of patrons supporting lots of people at low levels for some reason.

They could argue they're potentially paying a transaction fee when they're paying the creator if you're the only patreon. That's a silly argument though. I'd be happy to pay a single 2.9% of my total pledges + a single 35c fee.

This just kills $1 donations (and in my mind: anything up to $10)

It seems that they might also be de-aggregating pledges - which means not only will you be paying the 2.9% + 35c on each pledge, you'll also get N charges on your card rather than one. There was also some other hint that pledges would continue to be charged on the day you signed up rather than the 1st - just to make a triple whammy of idiocy.

>So that is like what $13 in fees for me.

No, 19 * .35 + 38 * .029 = 7.752. Still quite a lot of course. This change really disincentivizes making multiple small donations (no shit). If instead you'd pick 4 creators to give 9.5 to, the fees would drop to under a third.

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