Patreon cuts deep inside creators’ pockets
thoughts.jatan.space
thoughts.jatan.space
Source: 25yrs experience building payment networks
The stakes are lower the lower the amount. Who cares?
It's not worth disputing. Fire the customer if it crosses a threshold.
OP mentioned customer service. Pretty much any American can create 50+ hours of customer support and legal work for no reason at all in payments. Even an irate, clueless customer will waste an hour of your support staffs’ time.
Some choice moments: "Please keep my service on, I only charged back because I needed to make rent this month", "I know that wasn't my card, but that b---- owes me money."
And it's hard to fire these customers because they come back with a different card and fake names. They don't care that they're committing fraud; no one will prosecute them for $10 here, $20 there.
The real promise of crypto is to provide a system with 0% low level fraud like this.
Perhaps it is time to start asking for government IDs before accessing customer service.
I once had someone enter my zip code as the payment amount and completely drained my bank account at a time in my life when I somewhat enjoyed eating and if they told me I would have to send them a copy of a government issued ID before they would even talk to me I don’t even know what would have happened. Nothing good I can tell you.
Why, oh why is it so hard to understand the concept of multiple alternatives?
The customer chooses the mechanism, not the merchant. To best credit cards you'll have to be more customer friendly.
And if you are talking about internet retailers, can we make an exercise to think of how many new businesses would be viable if transactions of 20 cents were a thing?
Banks do credit worthiness checks as part of business.
Movie theaters actually do keep a banned list and enforce it.
Your landlord asks you to post a security deposit.
We literally have an entire credit worthiness sector.
You can also invert this and take trust as a default and only ban misbehaving customers.
If you literally are getting banned from grocery stores and starving the answer is probably "the prison warden has a legal duty to feed you".
When I say the majority of anti-crypto people are privileged, it's because of this. They never got to experience life in a world where people nickel-and-dime on a 5 dollar purchase. They can not even conceive of a world where "evil" business owners have legitimate reasons to want to protect themselves, and they can't even see that people will do the most stupid stuff over pettiness or because they think they can get away with it.
Ah yes, a classic case of "non-business owner privilege". Most of us are blind to how good we have it.
The "average individual" has approx one breast, one ovary and one testicle. Speaking of "average individual" is meaningless.
The important thing is to think of how many business transactions are completed or never initiated due to the existence or absence of an a payment option.
> protects businesses at the expense of themselves
If you browse around this thread, you'll find maybe 7 or 9 other times where I responded to this: of course, for most use cases people will be fine by using the current systems. This does not eliminate the other cases that are not viable with the current systems, such as cases where the risk is negligible to the user on the individual transaction, but the risk to the merchant is too high at scale.
> with 0% low level fraud like this.
It's got its own issues. For example i hope you've got a separate wallet per transaction. Otherwise someone will use their tumbled BTC to pay you and you'll get blacklisted from using it in exchanges.
>Otherwise someone will use their tumbled BTC to pay you and you'll get blacklisted from using it in exchanges.
This is a non-issue for cryptocurrencies with mandatory obfuscation like monero. Worst case scenario, you swap your tainted BTC for monero[0] and take the monero to an exchange.
Therefore eating the cost is the most profitable outcome.
These fines can be greater than $100,000 USD. Being kicked off a network such as Visa or MasterCard would be even worse.
I don't know which "crypto bros" you've been talking to, but as someone who is building a self-hosted payment gateway for crypto [0], the benefits from using crypto are two-fold: it eliminates the chance of fraud and it moves the cost of customer support to the merchant.
Also, once again I will have to repeat that no one sane will try to completely replace the existing payment systems with crypto. Crypto is meant to be an alternative for the cases where the cost of existing processors make the transaction not viable.
[0]: https://hub20.io/
Imagine bogus chargebacks because of buyer's remorse or purchases done with stolen credit cards. None of this happens for a merchant that accepts crypto.
All non-reversible transactions do is put the risk of fraud on the consumer. IE, if you buy anything with crypto and it turns out to be defective, or just not arrive, you have no recourse. You're just out the money.
Crypto credentials are not comparable to bank credentials. Crypto credentials are a public key; you still need the secret key in order to authorize a payment. Credentials are insufficient to make a crypto payment.
Bank credentials are usually just open-source information that anyone can get a hold of, and they are usually sufficient to make a bank payment.
2) It doesn't matter how secure you make it, because if your payment system is impenetrable, I'll just steal your account on some site where you've already enabled payments.
If you buy something with cash and it turns out to be defective or it is never delivered, are you left with no recourse?
"But online shopping could mean someone from some other part of the world!" yeah, then don't buy with crypto.
> All non-reversible transactions do is put the risk of fraud on the consumer.
"And for everything else, there is Mastercard..."
Yes, the risk goes to the customer. But the point here is that crypto can enable a whole lot of other businesses that don't exist today because of merchant risk.
Patreon "exists", but as TFA shows is stupidly expensive. I have a SaaS that I'd like to charge $0,50/per month. I can not do that because Stripe would eat 80% of it in fees. The minimum payment amount is $5, but from that Stripe still gets 9%!
If crypto payments were normalized (and if scaling solutions get more adopted to reduce tx fees), customers would think "well, if fifty-cent service is a scammer, it will be on reddit already. If it is not, then it is only fifty cents and I can get a lot of karma for it"
This doesn't address the primary risk that merchants take on: fraud. Either crypto or credit card, if you end up taking a payment via stolen credentials, you will refund the money.
The risk that the middleman in a two-sided takes on is fraud. The scam is pretty simple: steal credit card/crypto key, set up fake seller account, buy stuff from yourself using stolen credit card/crypto key, cash out. The middleman pays the money out to the scammer, and eventually has to pay back the person that was stolen from, credit card or no.
Micro transactions are a huge merchant risk not because angry customers can chargeback, but because one stolen account can undo 1000/X legitimate transaction (where X is your profit per transaction). If your margin is slim, you've just amplified your fraud risk.
And before you say that it's easier to steal credit cards than crypto keys: 1) wait until crypto becomes common and 2) it doesn't matter. If you secure your keys, then scammer finds some user's account credentials and cleans their account out.
This by itself shows that you are making a fundamental confusion: crypto is not to be compared with credit cards. crypto is meant to be cash.
Anyone that steals crypto will wash it before attempting to spend it. And depending on the network, you can't even know what is the origin. So, it would be the same as being robbed of cash.
But okay, let's move on.
> If your margin is slim, you've just amplified your fraud risk.
What if my margin is infinite? Say I want to sell digital goods, with an effective unit cost of zero. Why would I want to worry about the 1/1000 chance of someone "stealing" a copy, when that cost is nothing compared with credit card processor fees and the only thing I am trying to avoid is being hit with chargeback fees?
> wait until crypto becomes common
Crypto becoming common does not mean that people should be keeping large amounts in their wallets. A wallet is not a bank account.
Even those crazy enough to keep substantial amounts of funds in crypto would have (at least) two separate set of keys. One to use for their "hot wallet" and one for cold storage. This is almost basic practice. In a world where crypto "becomes common", what could happen is that your "bank" would be a service that is responsible (and properly paid) to be a trusted custodian of larger funds.
The point is not to have a system of final purchases, but final payments.
The Merchant will discover that the state does in fact have finality on the movement of value.
"But the state can still compel you to pay back". Yes, sure it does. The point is that the cost of doing it now is much higher and it is enough to deter a lot of opportunistic, fraudulent behavior from consumers. This difference in cost can make or break a business.
So you end up with a system that most people won't touch, and only appeals to users who need to make shady transactions.
In which case they may just as well leave out the middle merchant and exchange crypto directly.
It can also appeal to applications where payers and payees have some sort of social capital at stake. Patreon is the perfect example for that. If Patreon could offer the possibility of making payments via crypto with reduced fees, don't you think that people would do it?
It also can appeal for the use cases where the value of the transaction is too low for payers to worry about the "insurance" provided by the credit card networks, but that merchants need to be protected. E.g, selling digital goods online. Imagine you want to sell a book online and charge $2. With crypto would be easy. With a credit card, not so much.
Finally, it also would make sense for transactions where people would rather risk losing the money over their privacy. E.g, if Ashley Madison had a crypto option, how many of its users would use it just to be sure that their names would never end up on a list?
The idea that crypto solves fraud is laughable, particularly when so much fraud is facilitated by it.
If crypto truly solved all the problems you claim it solves, I think it’s reasonable for the major online marketplaces and vendors to have already switched over. I’ll note that they haven’t, and the state of the overall crypto market in the past few weeks suggests one good reason why.
> If crypto truly solved all the problems (...) vendors would have already switched over.
Transaction fees are not solved yet.
UX is not solved yet.
Privacy is not solved yet. (Well, it is if you count Monero, but for commerce you need a stabletoken, and you can not easily build a stabletoken on Monero like you can do it in Ethereum. In Ethereum we can have the stabletokens and privacy solutions are being built)
On-ramping is getting solved: it's relatively easy to get fiat-to-crypto today, though I'd say that the current players charging 3% are already at the limit of how they can go, and it's still too high.
There are still plenty of challenges and things to work on to get crypto as a viable alternative for payment networks.
> the state of the overall crypto market
The troubles in the current market have little-to-no relation with the story about crypto for payments. If this crash is going to get us rid of the stupid fools gambling their money in "investment opportunities" and it wipes out the nefarious scumbags who were selling ridiculous promises, all the better.
(And no, not all stabletokens are created the same. Tether is poison and everyone should stay away from it. The "algorithmic" stabletokens are already provably not viable. But DAI has managed to survive even worst market crashes than the current one, and USDC still has some semblance of trustworthiness.)
We said the same thing about Celsius
DAI can only crash "for good" if Ethereum crashes for good. MakerDAO is not over-leveraging itself to mint DAI into the market. MakerDAO does not pay any type of dividends to the people putting their crypto into the system - the opposite, actually.
Declaring a priori that all transactions are legitimate doesn't eliminate fraud, it just eliminates the system's ability to handle it. Actual humans can still get victimized. The gateway just says "Lalala can't hear you not my problem."
> and it moves the cost of customer support to the merchant.
Likewise, it moves the consequences of fraud onto the victim.
> for the cases where the cost of existing processors make the transaction not viable.
I assume you realize what kind of transactions end up being nonviable for existing processors that do have fraud prevention, money laundering safeguards.
Your site says:
> When you receive a payment, the money is yours. No hold-out periods, no chargebacks, no forced refunds.
Read that from the perspective of a bad actor. That's exactly the kind of payment gateway they would want. No way for a victim to seek redress once they've sent their money. You seem to be targeting merchants that:
1. Don't want customers to be able to seek any redress when fraud occurs.
2. Are willing to deal with the overhead of customer support in order to get 1.
Hell, your site actually advertises "No KYC" as a feature! OK, so, yes, you do seem to be deliberately building a system targeting ransomware, drugs, scams, and money-laundering.
If you are a customer that wants to make a transaction that can be reversed, you go for the credit card. If the value of the transaction is not high enough for you to care (micropayments) or if you rather lose some money but not give away your data, you go for crypto.
The problem that crypto can solve is for the merchants, like TFA. Patreon charges absurd rates because payers are problematic.
(Edit: once again, the anti-crypto crowd decides to downvote reflexively and ignore everyone that brings legitimate use cases. Why is it so hard to at the very least consider the point that others are trying to make?)
And you're pretending the customer doesn't exist by saying that crypto eliminates the chance for fraud. That's clearly a lie.
When I say about eliminating fraud, I mean fraudulent payments. What happens after the transaction is a separate problem, and not one that is meant (or possible) to be solved by crypto.
If you as a customer want more safeguards, then of course it is not recommended and you should use other alternatives.
Why would payers use a system which allows fraudsters to screw them over without recourse?
Crypto is not a solution because this is one of many problems that can't be solved with technology.
The real issue is that some people are consistent bad actors. You can't deal with that on a per transaction basis.
You'd need some kind of social credit system which assesses behaviour for trustworthiness accurately, independently, and objectively - instead of by personal feedback or by half-finished algorithm without appeal.
Even if such a thing were possible, everyone would consider it an intrusion on their privacy.
Merchants factor processing fees in when determining pricing which means the cost ultimately gets passed on to the customer. The merchant would of course like lower transaction fees.
But legitimate merchants also want to comply with consumer protection laws and have happy customers even when unpleasant things like mistaken charges, stolen credentials, etc. happen. There is a real value provided to both buyers and sellers when transactions are regulated and reversible. The payment processor's fee is the cost of that value.
Now, it may be that payment processing is a horrendously inefficient market and the processing fees are much higher than they need to be given the value they provide because of lack of market competition.
However, your product does not appear to compete with other payment processors, because it offers little of the value that they provide.
> The problem that crypto can solve is for the merchants, like TFA. Patreon charges absurd rates because payers are problematic.
Yes, and your product doesn't charge those rates... but nor does it make payers any less problematic. Fraud still happens. People still get their identity stolen, or have their kids grab the phone and buy $10,000 in Robux. It's just that with your product, merchants don't have to care.
You have to wonder what kind of merchants would consider that system a significant win. This sounds like tour company buying a passenger bus and choosing the cheapest bus with no seatbelts or a roof. Hey, it saves them money! But, you know, it's not the best deal for the passengers.
How is that we can do this with cash without having someone taking 2.9% + 30c per transaction?
> However, your product does not appear to compete with other payment processors, because it offers little of the value that they provide.
Absolutely correct. If you want to use Stripe, go use Stripe. They are great (most of the times). I use it as well. When it suits me.
I am not trying to replace Stripe, or Visa, or Mastercard. I am building an alternative for when these solutions do not work.
> People still get their identity stolen
Crypto payments (like cash!) do not require your identity to make a transaction.
> have their kids grab the phone and buy $10,000 in Robux.
You won't be carrying thousands of dollars in your crypto wallet, just like you don't carry throusands of dollars in cash.
> You have to wonder what kind of merchants would consider that system a significant win.
Can you do micropayments with Stripe? You can not. Then, you might be interested in a system that can.
Do you have a perfectly legal business that is for some reason in Mastercard's blacklist? Then you might be interested in having an alternative.
There are so, so many bad actors and it costs every payment platform so, so much more than I imagined before I saw it from the inside.
Someone commented disparagingly along th lines of f “try calling your bank after fraud and see if you get the money back”. My experience having been victim of financial crime 3 times is that the bank ate the cost every time. That’s part of the value proposition. Building a ledger is relatively easy- stopping people taking the piss is a nightmare.
Allow me to quote myself: using proof of work in place of CC processor fees is just moving the problem around - and arguably, making it worse: you're essentially taking on environmental debt, which all of us will eventually have to pay down.
(Before you reply with the usual "Ethereum devs have been promising PoS for years" line, I will tell you this: I pledge to drop all work on Hub20 if Ethereum doesn't complete the transition by the end of the year.)
Not for all blockchains. If that is the point of contention in regards to crypto, then just look at the many other blockchains that do not use PoW.
Have you been living under a rock for the past several decades? Or is this only a thing in EU? Every single fridge or TV sold has an energy class rating. Apple's new processors are all the rage because of their performance per watt. We use 230v (rather than 110v) AC because it's more efficient over medium-distance power lines.
> So there is no difference in between using an electric car and crypto in that regard - you are still using carbon-producing energy.
The car uses energy to move mass, it's almost the textbook definition of work in physics. Cryptocurrency is based on proof of waste - you must provide a mathematical proof of pointlessly wasted CPU cycles to conduct transactions.
> All energy needs to be green.
"All lives matter."
Why not two months from now? That's when they'll be done, right?
If everything goes well and according to plan, yes. But I am not going to make harsh decisions based on best-case scenarios.
So either Patreon has an order of magnitude more fraud going on or is massively wasteful in its business operations. Probably both.
Then Patreon came up with the same $0.50 / transaction number. However, since their average transaction amount is so much lower, they have to charge a higher number in order to make their target.
I think there's a reasonable case to view Patreon as a platform, not a pure payment processor.
Patreon is much more exposed to competition than the app stores, which are "protected" by the device duopoly.
I replaced it with a simple Ko-fi shop where you can just upload anything up to your 200GB quota (if you're a Gold member): https://ko-fi.com/s/7e9f22c63b
To illustrate how bad it can get - in EU VAT, if your yearly sales are over 30,000 Euros (it may even be 10k, I don't know the latest limit), you have to charge your customers/patrons the appropriate tax rate of the country that they are in. And if you don't, you may end up having to deal with the tax authority of that particular country.
People take this lightly, but as many are finding out, its serious business.
...
And - fraud is not handled by Paypal. Any chargeback, fraud, refund is your responsibility. You can even get your Paypal suspended for those reasons.
And no payment processor or retailer deals with fraud. They all suspend your accounts for chargebacks. The fee is the built in fee to cover _losses due to fraud_, not for "handling" it.
I am not sure what you mean by this, but bitcoin transactions do have fees which are determined in an open market fashion.
OP even calls this out - they like having different membership tiers. They're a content host for exclusive images. (Videos do tend to be offsite as unlisted Youtube videos)
Maybe you can grift off of that ignorance for a while, but that doesn't mean it's a sustainable business model.
You can apply a variance of that philosophy onto EVERYTHING.
"Automatic transmission merely exists because the general public doesn't know how to use something like manual transmission"
"Calculators merely exist because the general public doesn't know how to use something like a slide ruler"
Note, these are analogies, I'm not saying Patreon is as innovative or world-significant as either. But it IS optimized for a very specific use case, and it does it incredibly well.
I don't think it's unreasonable to distinguish between what Patreon does and basic PP. Users are paying for access to the package - which includes removal of PP friction - not just for a basic PP service.
"If people think Patreon is making a killing with their fee structure, they should build a competitor." >> Yes! And honestly this could be applied in so many places where people like to complain, and yet nobody builds a competitor, or they do and it ends up looking like the original. So easy to complain, so hard to do better.
By having the larger transactions subsidize the smaller transactions, how is that "more fair"?
The crypto folks are pretty cognizant of it, which is why they built an entire technology that isn’t reliant on intermediaries, banks, and payment processors to manage transactions.
A crypto Patreon in stablecoin like DAI on an L2 would basically be able to remove most of the high fees creators see in Patreon.
Yes, the dispute/chargeback process for cards is cumbersome today, but it is a solution - albeit inefficient. What is the crypto answer?
I don’t mean to put you on the spot for this question, but I would love to understand how decentralized solutions might address this issue.
In this vague hypothetical situation, what a lot of crypto folk would tell you is that you should use a smart contract, and not a regular transaction, to pay. Hypothetically the contract/network will act as an escrow agent, and would only complete the transaction when all input parameters are true AKA all parties are "satisfied". The successful input parameters and their truth sources would be agreed upon before hand.
I could argue more specific scenarios around fraud (buyer receives a good/service and pretends it was not satisfactory), but that can go on forever and I would encourage readers to go search for answers to specific edge cases because they are out there.
But the users of this platform do not need to know how to code.
Normally chargebacks are for scams or fraud not because something came broken from Amazon.
If you paid with cash, what is your remedy?
And if the reason you need a third-party is just to resolve disputes, then what's stopping to have other companies that do nothing but the scrow-holding and dispute resolution?
So for these cases you consider a high chance of the counterparty being dishonest, you use the alternative that can give you safeguards. If it makes more sense to use a credit card, you can still use it.
The lack of fraud (by which you really just mean lack of charge back) is only a benefit for the seller, and not the buyer. You are just moving risk to the buyer, and it is just like the old days of the Web when some sellers would try to get you to use western union to pay.
I've not seen you describe this yet in the thread, which tells me there is no benefit or you haven't thought this through.
They're definitely overcharging for more profit, but your margins won't be much lower if you handle payment yourself. Your 3% bank cut to receive money doesn't always work because often there's a minimum fee per transaction.
I know most iDeal (Dutch payment provider) transaction costs are 25 cents. It's a flat fee, so buying a €2000 TV will still leave you with 25 cents of fees, which is great for big stores, but when you use them do donate a single euro, the transaction fees are a whole quarter of the donation.
Tons of tiny transactions is a pretty terrible way to receive money. It's not "give up >15%" terrible, especially if your patrons tend to donate more, but Patreon needs to spread costs over all creators to make small content creators worth the effort.
Having a look at Donorbox, the same issue becomes clear: the cost for receiving payment in .NL is only 1.4%… and a €0,25 payment processor fee. These low processing fees are also only applicable to registered non profits in the NL which the author most definitely isn't. Even with the extra cheap rates and a non profit the fees to the lowest tier (±€3) add up to nearly 10% on a platform that's built around minimising costs for non profit organisations. There is the ability to use bank transfers for real cheap, but that's always a possibility anyway. One thing this site does seem to offer is the ability to offload all the site's cost onto the person who donates rather than subtract it afterwards, but that's just raising the donation price to compensate, not really a decrease in cost.
It's not hard with many cryptos that have basically no fees
Sell "Patreon Tokens". 100 for $100 at a one to one exchange rate. You can then spend in stores (one time redemptions) or subscribe to creators.
Which is a problem but their proposed solutions always seem to involve things like "now everyone pays on the anniversary of when they started supporting a creator" which just completely fucks up the original value proposition of "we merge lots of little transactions into one decent-sized one", as well as fucking things up for people like me who are just using Patreon as a tip jar for stuff they release publicly. Letting individual creators decide this will work for them and opt into it is never mentioned as an option, so Patreon gets to hear a loud, sustained scream from creators who are normally quiet, and walk it back a week later.
If I were donating to creators on different platforms, it would be 20 transactions, each with a fee of around $0.30, so fees would eat 30% of my donations.
It has drawbacks, like if the person doesn’t have $10 or they complain that they’re being charged. But a) is unlikely since most people who are that poor aren’t donating money, and b) is hopefully unlikely if you make it very clear how the payment system works and that they can get refunded if they cancel early.
They keep degrading the pooling and/or threatening to remove it entirely.
That is, instead of $3/month you do, say, $9/quarter.
Whole reason why any service is paid monthly is because it's just makes more money over customer lifetime.
People do month to month because they don't know if they'll find value in it, it's totally no commitment.
Asking to think if I'll still like this creator in 3 months requires actual thought... and $9 feels like money whereas $3 just doesn't.
so each donator would have ~$0.75 fee every month, regardless of how many creators they support. or whales could just fill their account for the quarter/year for $0.75 if they so chose.
and each creator would only have a $0.75 fee every time they decided to withdraw.
just build $0.01 into the contract and its a profitable system.
Nothing forces Patreon to take a cut for each and every donation, let alone such a hefty fee. Plenty of micropayment services charge instead a fee for transactions into and out of their system, and internal transactions don't incur any cost or transaction fee.
If Patreon insists in taking a hefty cut from each and every donation, that's a problem caused by their business model.
Payment processors do. Donorbox [0], which the author switched to, states their pricing. For 1$, you'll pay ~32p (Stripe)/ ~51p (PayPal) for the payment processor, so 32%-51%. For 5$, you'll pay ~40p (Stripe) or 59p (PayPal), so still 8%-12%.
This is without Patreon/Donorbox having made a single dollar yet, but they do need to pay people to set up payment, their platform and support. Also, they want to make profit, since they're not a charity, after all.
The one downside is that if PayPal ever stops offering this, the revenue model for ardour.org will have to change, since there are really no viable alternatives.
Whether you’re donating $1000 or $1, Patreon is getting their 8% (or 5%, or 12%).
So I think Patreon likely does help individuals get business, even if they aren't out advertising on your behalf. That said, I agree the fee does seem high, given it is largely payment processing (and a simple media player) and we know what Stripe charges for that. I think they will probably be at risk from higher quality entrants like Substack who is moving into podcasting as well.
A lot of people have been able to offer niche content through Patreon, so it's a net positive even if they fumble their offer sometimes
There's no moral amount they should charge imo; it's completely arbitrary. If you think it should be less, vote for better people, advocate for better things, make crypto that works and isn't exclusively an attraction for criminals and rent-seekers, or pour money into marketing a competitor. You can switch to another service, but I might not want to give your other service my card info. Well if your other service takes paypal I'll use it, so they'll start 5% behind.
There is a lot of room for competition though. As a supporter, my loyalty is to the creator not to the platform.
Why do you think that? Sending money p2p is hard in a world where cryptocurrency is treated like an investment vehicle and not a payment system.
>There is a lot of room for competition though. As a supporter, my loyalty is to the creator not to the platform.
You don't clearly speak on behalf of most users here. "Using multiple platforms" in the fiat/traditional system effectively means giving your credit card information to multiple businesses and increasing your risk for fraud, overcharging and identity theft. It's the reason why these intermediaries like PayPal and Patreon operate in the first place.
Thing is, it requires government regulation.
The player sucks, episode search sucks.
For example, if you support a Youtube channel you might continue watching on Youtube and rarely need to visit Patreon's website at all.
But if you support an author who is releasing a book, three pages per day? And you're paying for early access? You'll notice there's no bookmarking / next page features.
And if that author has three price tiers, depending on how many pages of early access you get? Only the most expensive tier can get new-pages-uploaded e-mails - new pages being unlocked for lower tiers isn't an event that triggers notification e-mails.
Which is generally more advance chapters. Maybe discord benefits, extra side-story chapters, access to in-progress/draft chapters, or author Q&A sessions. I've never seen notification e-mails listed as a benefit.
Almighty coincidence that e-mail notifications are always reserved for the earliest access tier, but every author has forgotten to advertise the benefit.
The other side of it isn't great either. The content posted by the creators I follow is often slow to load, gifs & images being huge & slow search.
But far worse is Patreon's messaging platform. Write a long message, then accidentally have a window resize event occur and lose your entire message.
Patreon's problem with losing text has burned me more times than other products with similar issues (like creating a Jira issue).
Some platforms like Slack do a much better job of saving a draft.
Patreon is not just asking this fee, because it’s middle men for recurring payments. If that was the case, you could use Stripe for your payment. You could easily cut these fees by providing donors a stripe link.
I guess the writer wouldn’t do that, because there is value in the donation platform.
Argumentation is not grounded.
If we compare the case with Between Epic games and Apple, where Apple was forcing high % for literally payments which could be done much cheaper at any other payment provider.
Some of these telemarketing companies that raise money for charity takes in the hundreds of percent more of the donations than this in fees btw. That something to be outraged about.
In my experience Patreon has been around 11% cut scenario, split very roughly between Payment Fees and Platform fees. But I am on the Founders plan, which is the same 5% platform fees as Patreon Lite, but with the extra features of the 8% Pro plans.
I do think it is probably best for creators to diversify their platforms, but I still think that Patreon is worth it just because of it being a very well known platform outside of just tech circles.
I think it does have the potential to be like Kickstarter and really broaden the appeal of this type of contribution, but from what I can see, it hasn't actually managed to do that part yet -- both based on articles like this one and my own anecdotal experience.
That’s a totally a reasonable cost for smoothly running the infrastructure necessary to support a creator with a monthly subscription model.
Patreon gets to take the money they take because they've found a good niche, not because their website can do something that all websites have been able to do since the 1990s.
I personally think they take too much for what they provide. That's all. I am very happy they exist, though, because otherwise everyone would just be chasing the algorithm.
That is describing most money-making websites in existence
Possibly because you are not processing and remitting EU VAT and other digital international taxes which you should. Actually, its doubtful that a lot of people who engage in such creator activities are even aware that they should need to file taxes for that kind of income in the first place, leave aside process digital tax.
Patreon handles all of that and reports and pays it to legitimate authorities, removing all the legal and financial responsibilities from the creators' hands. As international digital tax schemes proliferate (Japan already has one or planning one, other OECD countries also), this is going to become even more important. Not that its not important right now.
This is before the fact that all chargeback, fraud etc are handled by Patreon.
...
A lot of these people, including you, confuse Patreon and similar platforms with payment platforms like Paypal. They aren't the same. At Paypal, Stripe etc, not only they don't handle digital tax for you, but also you are on your own regarding chargebacks, fraud and refunds. And if you have more than 5% of them, they can just disable your account.
You don't have those issues with Patreon.
I will never type in my credit card to give some random app developer $1.99. I will frequently click buy on an app in the App Store.
Same is likely true for Patreon. Even if I found your videos or podcast by some other means, the fact you can mention “Thank to to my patrons” means I can easily find you (not discover you) on Patreon and subscribe.
If those are every bit as low friction as the alternatives, I’m willing. (But that includes “I heard a podcast while I was driving mention patron; I should spend 30 seconds and give that creator money.” where I can find and login to Patreon faster than I can find the creator’s random website URL.)
For recurring billing, no, I will not give a random website my CC near as easily as I will Apple or Patreon (or any other platform that stands more to lose by biting my hand than an individual site does).
Is that an OK choice given your preferences? It seems low friction, with the caveat that you have to remember my random website URL.
For a recurring donation, the hover over "A donor account is created automatically for recurring donations. Account setup info will be emailed to you." would remind me the hassle of using a random extra account that I need to keep track of, trust that it won't get breached, and be able to find and login to when I want to stop the recurring donations [and trust that the site will actually stop the donations without hassle].
That's going to be enough to block me for recurring (but you probably have data on the people it doesn't block, meaning people's preferences vary).
However, I get immediate cash access to a donation (recurring or otherwise), and almost everyone covers the transaction fee. This feels less centralized and gimicky than Patreon -- at the cost of losing sokoloff.
It’s not about sokoloff. It’s about what gives your group the most net income after all fees and factors.
Most creators who have "made it" (whatever that may be) should work on setting up their own website with their own payment processing and encourage fans to use it, less for the additional money and more for the security against single-income flows.
It's easy to find "big things" on any platform, the question is which are successful for those trying to grow?
A better example of a more ‘reach’ offering would probably be YouTube’s similar offering (although I don’t know their fee structure), which goes beyond just reach and has very low friction for creators who make content on that platform.
Honestly I feel like Patreon as a platform is pretty underwhelming from the donator side of things, nor do I see much in terms of what’s changed to improve the experience over the years as their fees have increased - but I have no idea what has changed on the creator side.
I think the big takeaway (no surprise) is that the creator really owns the donator, not the platform - vs someplace like Apple where they have a much stronger relationship with the customer than your typical app developer does.
I have. It's nice to have a centralized UI for your donations and I would never enter my payment information just to support a single creator with a dollar or two.
My spreadsheet says the total cut of my take that goes to Patreon and payment processing is about 10-15%, but I am an Early Adopter who gets a much better deal from them. For someone like this dude who doesn’t have this deal and has their usurious international fees on top of it, it’s definitely a bad choice.
Patreon did one big thing: they took the concept of “monthly donations to support the arts” and repackaged it in a way that took off. I never got support via the old PayPal donation button like I have via Patreon.
Sounds like Patreon helped you after all.
I'm not saying that they promote or market you, but having the name (much like Apple) seems enough to encourage people to pay you.
OTOH, I certainty don't think that their cut sounds like a good deal; rather, it sounds more like your options are a bad deal or no deal at all.
If you have a design/image creation software and XCode you could make almost any app.
Patreon doesn’t give any tools to creators to directly create.
That dude writes as if he is unaware of the existence of the government and tax laws. He is on a platform that is built for non-profits despite obviously not being a non-profit. And he does not seem to have heard of any kind of thing like international digital tax or the like.
When you just ignore the existence of such things, of course ~14% looks like a lot.
I'm happy to outsource anything involving money.
's/the reach/the big-name familiarity/'
's/more users/more legitimacy & perceived security for most potential donors/'
On the other hand, switching away from YouTube would be instant channel suicide, because they are actually the ones providing the reach. I think YouTube must see the existence of Patreon as a critical failure. YouTube is doing all the hard work and Patreon is getting paid for it!
The couple apps and podcasts I've subscribed to that did roll their own payments and subscriptions have been hell to cancel or adjust my subscription, riddled with dark patterns, and one seemingly just... removed the unsubscribe button entirely. There was no way to cancel at all.
The high fees of patreon have nothing to do with payment support issues.
For the apps like GPay and Amazonpay, yes it is data. But of course there is the reference implementation app that does not do any of that. People just prefer the other apps because they offer good cashbacks.
For the banks, it's a service they offer, just like having a website and passbook updation. No customer is going to go to a bank without a website and now the same applies for instant transfer.
UPI exists to solve precisely that problem. It forces everyone to use a common interface. Customers can use any app they want to access the API. They don't depend on the bank for anything except the actual Credits and Debits in your account.
Banks make money with your money. And 99% of stored money comes from 0.1% of their clients.
Leverage coming from fractional-reserve [1] is just a part of it but it gives you some idea.
If you mean just credit cards, it's much different scale than what we're discussing here and a duopoly which is basically a money printing machine. If somebody has any insight how much money Visa/Mastercard make from banks and institutions vs users I'd love to hear it.
But don't forget that apart from a small percentage which goes to CC provider, they also get the most valuable data there is about you as a consumer (and more generally about all consumers worldwide and trends across multitude of dimensions). I'm guessing these companies could easily survive just selling the data.
And you can have multiple levels od membership.
> I think you can give superchats on premiers
You can if you enable them on your premieres. However a lot of creators just publish their videos rather than ran run them as premieres. But you can also enable tipping which allows viewers to give a one off tip.
> Not sure if you can limit videos to membership only.
You can, you can also limit live streams and playback of past live streams to members only. However as not to fragment their Patreon supporters, these videos are normally just uploaded as unlisted and the link is shared on Pateron.
As for the cut. On Ad's its typically a 60/40 split with YT taking the 40%. On Superchats, superstickers, superthanks (yt's one off tippings) and memberships its a 70/30 split (yt's cut being 30%).
If you have a YT page, but get your money from Patreon, you have a fallback if either of them drops you for whatever reason.
That's before you get into podcasts on Patreon, which seems to make up a lot of their userbase, if you look at their most patronized stuff. There's no particularly good podcast monetization platform, rightfully, because of its decentralized protocol.
Better to distribute your earnings on a 3rd party so if you get banned from one you still have the other.
Looking at the top 5 creators on Patreon[1], it seems like two of them are primarily Youtube channels. I could be wrong about that, but that's what a quick search implies to me.
In other words, it doesn't look like Patreon is exclusively or even mainly reliant on Youtube. On the other hand, if Youtube was only (let's say) 20% of their revenue, and Youtube went away, it could hurt or kill Patreon. So, maybe?
[1] https://backlinko.com/patreon-users#most-popular-creators-on...
.25 + .03x = .17x .25 = .14x x = .25/.14 = 1.79
So, for these numbers (exact rates vary but are in this ballpark), a transaction size of $1.79 will result in a cut of 17%.
There is a non-zero cost per transaction, with any credit card company, with paper checks (built into the cost of the check), with any payment scheme other than "give me the cash in person". The smaller the transaction size, the larger the cost will be as a percentage. The numbers described here seem pretty typical.
If you're talking about or doing many transactions below US$12 and paying the standard fee structure, you're doing it wrong.
Patreon handles all fraud, chargebacks, scams, and on top of that it also handles international tax schemes like EUVAT. Which is a GIGANTIC help for any creator because otherwise you will have to process and file the tax from all those sales one by one yourself or have an accountant do it for you. He seems to have missed that part of the cost. Donorbox seems to be for non-profits, which, I very much doubt the author's writing qualifies as. He may get away with it since he is from India and India may not be cracking on such things yet, but as the international VAT schemes proliferate and India jumps on board, it will be a different story.
This is Youtube vs Patreon (https://www.pymnts.com/subscriptions/2022/vimeo-raises-rates...)
"She says she began making subscriber-only Patreon content in 2020 and hosting it on Vimeo. Then came the notice from Vimeo on March 11 that van Baarle’s bandwidth usage was in the top 1% of Vimeo’s users. So if she wanted to keep hosting her content on the site, she’d need to upgrade to a custom plan that could run her as much as $3,500 a year, given a week to make changes or leave the site. The Verge noted that her experience was just one of many — numerous Patreon creators received the notice, which has resulted in “confusion and panic.”
So why do people use Patreon?
The answer to that is why Patreon can charge what they do.
And you can't post member-only videos at Youtube. Also, Youtube is just Youtube - you can't monetize your presence in other platforms with it.
I do support creators moving off the sluggish excuse for a website that Patreon is though - especially if they can't even provide the main advantage of a centralized patronage platform: to keep fees low by aggregating smaller amounts distributed to many creators in one credit card/bank transaction.
>the real cut for a creator on Patreon is often a stark ~14-17% depending on the exact scenario.
edit: now I get it, seems like you are native speaker and me and author are not, I guess correct way should be "cut from a creator" instead?
it currently reads to me as 14~17, which is not great, but not that high either depending on the exact case.
> When considering all factors, including standard payout processing fees, the real cut for a creator on Patreon is often a stark ~14-17% depending on the exact scenario.
Let's say I make $25/m from Patreon. I receive 79.18% to 86.12% (processing fees, Patreon fee and currency conversion)
Withdrawing every two months via Payoneer ($10 USD fee under $500, minimum $50), I would take home $33.06 to $29.59.
Which is 34 to 41% of the total, before tax.
Anyone who uses Patreon will be much more likely to support you because they already have a Patreon account. They don't have to setup an account on some other platform and add their CC details again.
creator <> Patreon <> stripe/square <> visa/mastercard <> your money
Should be
creator <> one entity to rule them all (possibly decentralized) <> your money
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/21/patreon-cpo-interview-doub...
“Ooooh. My rent is too high. People should stop renting from Marsid Realty.”
CAPITALISM cuts deep inside creator's profits. Patreon is only one such that relies on the creative works of humans, and gatekeep while charging usurious rates for "access".
Patreon DOES cut deep, for little benefit. But so does every company that hires people. By definition, we do not get the full surplus of our labor. We get scraps, and the "job creators" (read: capitalist scam) get the lion's share of our work.
That's how capitalism works - it's a scheme where only a few at the top get the benefits of the rest of us, all the while they tell us that they deserve our benefits of work.
It's like carnivores being judgmental of hunters.
for-profit platforms will always seek to maximize the function, the marginal value of the rent they take. any charity to creators is incidental dynamics along the way
So Ghost is not a creator platform. Its a payment platform.
For a customer who runs a small town Indiana newspaper, who may be a somewhat typical customer, it's not that complicated: They won't have international subscribers and they would pay state and federal taxes-- standard income staff stuff.
And doing so with Ghost vs Patreon could save thousands of dollars per year!
> And so many of these companies aren't even profitable, either.
It's not profitable because it's an engineering playground - the objective is not to solve the business problem described above, it's to build complexity for the sake of complexity to justify future funding rounds.
If they wanted to, they could literally consider the project done and run it with a skeleton crew handling support & maintenance, but why intentionally put yourself out of a job?
Yeah. EVERYBODY says that for EVERY single app or service that is posted on Hackernews. They could do it with even less people and funding. Yet, there doesn't seem to be anyone who actually did any such thing in a few months with 4-5 people.
Apparently, real world works differently.
What about https://liberapay.com ?
Also, keep in mind that once a well-funded player with infinite money to spend on marketing enters a market it's often no longer worthwhile for a bootstrapped player to compete even if it's possible on technical grounds.
> The problem is doing it at scale.
IMO that’s more down to support/operations than tech.
The technical problem was, and still is, making it easy, safe, legal and scaling it to millions of users. Like every single technical problem in the tech startup world.