Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

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I make my living off of Patreon and I can confirm that they do jack shit to promote your work unless you are already one of their top earners. “Paying for the reach” is a bullshit excuse for the amount of money they’re sucking off of creators to try and make an immense payout for their VC.

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.

> 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.

Apple also gives a full suite of developer tools, documentation, example code. Built in debugging, testing, simulation.

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.

Aye, that just further reinforces my last paragraph.

...that I can use for free to build a Mac app that won't run without security warnings, or to test in a simulator -- otherwise I have to pay $100/yr. The 30% tax brings no value.

I'm actually just thinking about content. Part of our business is podcasts and selling premium subscriptions incurs a 30% take and all you get is some consideration in placement in Apple Podcasts. And you lose direct access to your customers.

> this dude who doesn’t have this deal and has their usurious international fees on top of it, it’s definitely a bad choice.

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.

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