And that's why the older model worked better: a donor would pledge $1 to twenty creators, and would get charged one $20 transaction fee at the beginning of each month.

The creators ate the Paypal fee (usually 4-5%), and then Patreon collected an additional 5% for simply coordinating these exchanges with their service.

I doubt there were many people who only pledged $1 to one creator and that was it. But if that was truly a problem, then sure, one 35-cent charge per month would be reasonable.