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Comment by tmorton | Hacker News Reader

Ok, that link makes things clearer, and I can understand their position a bit more.

But they missed the BIG OBVIOUS solution: charge a pro-rated "first month" pledge, then combine all subsequent pledges like they do now.

For example, if I become a patron at the $10/month level, on the 15th of the month, they can charge me $5 immediately. Then the $10 gets added to my regular charge on the first of the month, and everyone saves in processing fees.

As a patron, I would much rather get one charge per month on the first. The current schedule works great.

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I'd swap that. Charge the $10 immediately, then bundle the pro-rated refund of the half of the month you missed into the first month's subscription charge.

Yeah exactly. This is the extremely simple solution which closes all loopholes and avoids a horrific mess of new fees.

I'd like to take Patreon in good faith here and assume they've just blundered into a huge mistake which benefits nobody except for the payment processors. If so, they should be correcting course in the next few days. But until that happens, I remain skeptical.

I totally agree that pro-rating seems to be by far the best and most obvious solution. So much so that it almost feels like lying by omission when they don't discuss it as a possible solution in their blog post.

I stopped using Patreon a while back when they got hacked and leaked my personal information, but before that I was donating $1 a month to a handful of creators. I feel like that isn't an atypical use case at all - maybe even the most common pledge amount for a lot of creators. And there is absolutely no way I would have been willing to pay a $0.38 fee to pledge $1.

There are often privileges and perks associated with being a patron of a certain creator. These perks aren't pro-rated, thus subscribing late in the month for a day or two might be a viable way to cheat this system. Personally, I don't think this is a huge deal, and, if this is their reasoning, it's a mistake.

Charge the pro-rated amount on the first of the first month and the full month's amount on the initial subscription date.

You could even do it where you pay the full cost immediately, but the difference between that and the prorated cost counts as a credit to the next start-of-month payment. eg. If there's a $100 reward tier and I sign up 60% of the way through the month, I immediately pay $100, then at the start of next month my $100 pledge is discounted by the $60 I overpaid for the previous month, so I only pay $40.

Effectively, it flips the first two months so you pay the full amount immediately but if you stay on for at least two months it all balances out in the end.

EDIT: Ninja'd by sibling comment

> But they missed the BIG OBVIOUS solution: charge a pro-rated "first month" pledge

The problem there is for creators who post high-value content - Jimmy McThief can sign up on the 29th, pay a fraction of the subscription tier, snarf all the content on the 30th, then unsubscribe.

Patreon could offer a "only allow patrons access to [certain content] after a full monthly payment has been taken" option but that would be the simple solution...

There are a number of obvious and simple fixes to that problem, but honestly it would be fine to just ignore it. People who are going to "scam" like that are such a teeny tiny fraction of the user base, they're barely worth considering.

Patreon has been doing great; even the porn stars who charge large fees apparently have overwhelmingly honest patrons. It's much more of a theoretical problem than an actual one.

No no no, you just don't understand! Solving the issue of "how do we handle mid-month sign-ups for a service that bills monthly" is a nigh impossible problem that requires at least 40 to 50 Stanford- or MIT-trained engineers.

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