How to compete with Patreon
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Being a Patron (which is what Patreon was trying to do) traditionally meant supporting someone, no matter what their output. If your tortured genius put out one work a year, so be it. If they popped out Sunflowers then even better!
There doesn't have to be any quid pro quo at all.
It's what we now call Basic Income financed by someone's surplus.
Don't overthink it. It's not a tip, it's a gift, an expression of support. It may be something more, but in the end you're giving money to someone, period.
As an aside, it's really unclear if Patreon payments should be considered income in the US. It's a gift, but it's up to the giver to handle that. I doubt creators would need a 1099 in that case either.
It isn't consider a gift as you a gaining something (access to page) so you need to pay tax on that.
This is one thing that bothers me with patronite and other platforms. I wish I could simply send a gift (without acces to anything) and not to pay another tax on already taxed money.
Many EU states tax tips as well (all the way -> VAT/corporate/income/social tax)
If creators had to administer that stuff on an individual basis they'd have no time left for creating.
It doesn't ACT like 'a gift', it acts like a paycheck. If a guy gets paid by a car dealership because he's the owner's kid without having to do anything, the IRS doesn't care whether he has to work for real but it very much cares whether he pays his taxes on his income.
I also pay a writer (he goes by Wildbow) a couple of bucks a month, for posting weekly chapters of his webserial.
Both have no relation to rewards, it's just because I love the stuff they create for free and want to support them.
(Federal) gift tax isn't really a thing except for the exceedingly wealthy. Idk about all states
They also had good timing since they allowed you to send your faves money before the creator platforms developed in-house solutions.
Platform that charges "per work" AND automatically does the paperwork for taxes that makes it a gift, not income.
I mean yes and no. I feel like I'm getting a fairer deal from some Artists than others that I support. So I admit I sometimes only subscribe for 1-3 months, and then unsubscribe, when Output is low, or variance in content themes is too high. The price then isn't really justified.
Also, for some artists, Patreon serves as an ad-hoc subscription platform. If I'm essentially being promised 3-4 units of "Art" per month, you bet I'm going to unsubscribe if the Artist doesn't post at all, unannounced. It's also not fair to call these "gifts" - I get exclusive access to most of the content on Patreon and with one exception, all Artists advertise it as a service. I'd be different if I could consume their content on another platform for free, but often times I can't.
Tbf though, I still don't have a reliable income, so maybe I'd change my habits once I got that taken care of.
Allowing or disallowing specific categories of content is a lower-level business decision than understanding your customers' basic needs.
It's not when your sites majority income comes from a specific theme of posts. Patreon knows this, because they thought of it as a low level decision in the wake of credit card companies NSFW adversity. They then had top pursue other avenues of clearing NSFW content, because their business have tanked. [0]
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/22/patreon-to-roll-out-tools-...
That said, I don't understand the motivation for Patreon's decision to stop bundling payments, unless they're being forced to by issuing banks or payment processors for some reason.
EDIT: Thinking about it more, I suspect it has to do with fraud detection and prevention. A site like Patreon is at high risk to be a place to siphon money from stolen cards: Create some fake artists and have a bunch of fake patrons pledge to them using stolen cards. This kind of scam is likely much harder to detect and prevent with bundling, when multiple fake artists can be mixed in with some real ones in a single charge.
I think many people don't realize that when an online payment is charged back for fraud, the merchant (Patreon, in this case) is liable for the charges, not the issuing bank. (Well, there are some instances where liability can be shifted to the issuer, but they're not that common.) High chargeback rates can also result in higher fees for the merchant. And of course the effort to detect, prevent, and remediate the fraud has to be paid for out of Patreon's commissions, in addition to everything else.
https://liberapay.com/Liberapay/
Ko-Fi is a proprietary example with 0% donation fees. They make money through a "Gold" offering and through a 5% fee on non-donation income. And they're successful enough to be hiring right now:
The way I understand it, the motivation is that they're losing money on bundled microtransactions until customers cross some monthly threshold (let's say that's the $14.29 mentioned in the article). So let's say a customer has a $1 monthly subscription to Creator A, and another $1 subscription to Creator B, adding up to a bundled $2 monthly charge to their credit card. That's apparently below the price point where the provider is able to offset the processing fees. Whereas if they have two separate $1 charges, that reduces the loss somehow (I'm not a payment processing expert and I didn't read the fine print that the author posted, so I don't understand exactly why that's the case.)
I wonder if the "solution" would be for Patreon to have a minimum subscription model, where each customer is guaranteed to pay, each month, an amount that's above the threshold required for Patreon to avoid a loss on processing fees. You sign up as a patron, and you're automatically dinged $15/mo as long as your account is active. You can choose to route those $15 to whatever creators you want, and you'll see a single line item on your bill. And then obviously you can exceed that threshold if you want to support more creators.
This is what is being questioned. I've spent several years working in merchant processing, and I've never heard of a billing structured offered by a processor in which it would be advantageous to split charges up. No one understands why Patreon would be losing money by bundling. It could be something with anti-fraud or anti-carding, but I'd have to chew on that a bit more.
Separately, while Patreon's charging changes seem boneheaded, I'd guess at least a 50% chance that they weren't driven by stupidity but rather by a CFO having a come to jesus conversation with the e-team. Driven by the fact that microtransactions run on a credit card are tough.
Their giant raises make more sense if they were eating a ton of fees in an attempt to hold out for scale where enough people (eg I spend $20-ish/mo on patreon) charge enough money that the 5% covers the processing fees.
I don't WANT a payment system that is about beating up other payment systems in the schoolyard and making them cry.
I want a payment system that takes money on my behalf and then pays me with it.
I'll put up with a lot of inefficiency if it's boring and predictable. You're gonna have a heck of a time prying me away from Patreon in favor of your new lunch-money taking payment system with crypto and hookers. If you're leading with 'take their lunch money', I don't trust you.
I don't trust Jack Conte THAT much, but it's sure a lot more than you.
The author also dumped on Patreon’s incredibly low processing fee. Who is going to compete with 5% plus payment processing? And they dumped how this processing fee is unsustainable and that the community was mad about changing it.
What business is going to disrupt margins like that? That’s like saying “I’m going to sell stuff cheaper than Costco.” Good luck with that!
I was under the impression that Patreon is struggling because their profits aren't enough to balance out the 9 digits of VC money they greedily took in, not because there's no profits.
It's hard to agree on this one.
Personal anecdote: In 2010's I worked in a micropayments broker linked with all telecom companies.
The whole thing was: that NSFW creators used a shared SMS shared code (i.e. a SMS number that receives messages for several creators and the code (for instance HNCODE25) was used to move money to a balance account) and for each of the payments that people used to do with them the telecom company got 15% slice, and the rest the telecom moved the money to the broker.
Another point: In Brazil due to the PIX [1] almost all of those payment platforms (Paypal included) are becoming irrelevant because you can generate random tokens that can be hard to trace, and all the payments occur instantaneously giving enough time for withdrawn before any attempt of censorship and or any policy change. [2]
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pix_(payment_system) [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19867120 ...
About the article itself, it's surprising to me (and I assume some sort of intentional ignorance here) that even in the current state of technology we do not have a "dumb pipe" payment system as before and we're still relying upon those middle man actors or not-so ergonomic alternatives as P2P crypto.
If you care about spending just $2/mth and not more... that may not be a risk you wanna take.
This might not be entirely realistic, but the idea of passing that choice on to the end user seems interesting:
Payment of 12.99 EUR (VAT of X% included) to $vendor for $service, choose one:
[ ] - regular payment, 0.50 EUR fixed fee
[ ] - safe™ payment*, 2.00 EUR fixed fee
* safe™ payments can later be disputed and reversed, if necessary
Then again, I guess it's also possible to go in the opposite direction and look into additional means of verifying who is making a purchase - over here, we have chips in government issued ID cards which can be used for signing documents, whereas most banks already use a 2FA system with codes (mobile app, not SMS; but also not TOTP, rather issued certs based on a contract with SmartID) for approving access to bank accounts and then another code for confirming orders. It wouldn't be entirely unrealistic to imagine that technology progressing and merging in the decades to come: you can already use the ID cards for signing into everything from government portals, to utility service providers.
Go onto the various scam reddits and see how many people suddenly wish they hadnt listened to the seller and used friends and family instead.
Despite of what happen in Brazil politically this is a very serious process that if a judge misjudge that it could open a huge precedent for a lawsuit against the state.
You can still have your bank account blocked by a judge.
That is behind everyone of their dumb decisions.
They had a great model harvesting nickels and then they sold a vision of Taylor Swift being on Patreon to VCs.
It was so simple and elegant. As a consumer I had cost control, too. Plus there were no micro-transactions, only one charge to me.
EDIT : I think what you missed is how this is an issue mostly with advertising-funded websites, especially platforms. More views = more money for the website. (It even goes for Hacker News, somewhat !) But for Flattr 2.0, more/longer browsing doesn't (directly) equal more money (even for the creators, in aggregate) ! Even Patreon has an issue like this - GP is talking about the bundling issue, but Patreon still has an artificial moat that exacerbates this : not only it's annoying to reduce the funding for many other creators at once when you add a new one, you can't even reduce your funding for a specific artist to less than $1/month - regardless of how much you might be paying per month to Patreon in total !
Or are you against free markets ?? They tend to promote what people want and manufacturing wants too, you know ?
Flattr 2.0 of course still has some issues : why a very short music video should be rewarded much less than a long form blog post ? (OtoH the music video is much more likely to be much more popular across a wider variety of people, so I guess that issue is self-fixing ? EDIT: not so much for a poem ?)
I don't think that Flattr2 is more true to a free markets vision than Flattr1. Neither do I believe that a free market is necessarily better than a regulated market. Markets are a highly useful tool, not a goal themselves.
https://github.com/search?q=flattr&type=repositories
(It's also out of control of the creators trying to artificially increase engagement by doing tricks with the Flattr 1.0 buttons on their websites.)
Apologies for linking to GitHub, but that's where the official repository is, so...
Unfortunately Patreon saw itself as primarily a tech-company able drive interactions via its own platform and capture more value from creators[]. The pandemic - and the ensuing explosion in the number of creators and consumers - fed this illusion further.
Both factors led to an influx of VC money, and now they are stuck trying to make returns against a mostly fictitious valuation.
[] This should have always been a warning sign, the average creator isn't rich, they aren't making bank on things like t-shirts.
[*] Footnote.
And the centralization works for creators, too. I have several times discovered a creator on Patreon whose work I already appreciated, but who had not done a good job of communicating that they even had a Patreon, so I never knew about it. I only found them by accident, and pledged money to them, just because I was already on Patreon.
5% + 5% is a lot (10% if my math is right), but I'm not sure where artists get a better deal these days, at least on the internet.
Further, the Patreon interface sucks for users, and I'm sure it sucks even more for creators who have to engage with it more frequently. But, not so bad that I, personally, am looking to find another alternative.
The platforms would be wise to have reoccurring revenue from the dreamers, and also backend points on the unicorns.
In general, in 2023+ the biggest problem seems to be signal to noise ratio. There so much content being scattered about, it's increasing more difficult to find quality. More and more (personal) resources are lost to getting past the noise. There's less time and energy left for the quality.
It would work if your tiny team could attract an incredibly huge number of creators who somewhat create a minimum volume of transactions every months.
Otherwise you'd on the hook paying monthly fees for your platform's hosting costs, and you can't properly negociate processing fees as you have no idea of how much volume you'll be processing montb to month (it's not even based on some supply/demand cycle, you're stuck with when creators feel like creating)
I've seen it from the otherside following a Youtube creator on a pay per video plan, and there would be months going by with no videos happening but messaging back and forth to keep the community alive.
Businesses like these don't work without huge scale.
Honestly this is the reason I generally ignore these types of video essays, the people who make them generally have the most lazy criticisms that always end up pointing to the same boogeymen(VC, capitalism, US, etc.)
maybe reflect inwards a bit more
Say my (made up) target is $50,000 a year, and if my patrons reached this goal, any further donations would cause everyone's to decrease so the ceiling was maintained OR the overflow would go, transparently, to other artists I supprted, like runoff voting. I don't like the feeling of throwing money to already-popular people if they're already earning enough. I know my local food shelf needs to help, and many other causes that align with my values.
> Part of what made Patreon explosively successful, in the first place, was that Patreon had apparently cracked the code on one of the hardest problems on the internet: micropayments.
> By the time Patreon had come along people had been discussing the problem of micropayments on the internet for at least two decades.
I guess the author missed the years where Flattr buttons were popping up on every website, blog, and even comment ?
Flattr 1.0 seems to have been killed by a combination of the 2013 Twitter APIpocalypse, being €-first, and not being based in the Silicon Valley :
https://blog.hsnyc.co/post/flattr-works/
https://thenextweb.com/news/flattr-twitter-payments-ban
Then Flattr 2.0 tried again :
https://www.engadget.com/2017-10-24-adblock-plus-relaunches-...
And I doubt that Flattr was even the first to do the "bundling" trick, heck this is probably also what made the Minitel so successful ?
But as you can see it works in the opposite way : the patrons set a specific sum of money to be distributed each month, which then gets redistributed depending on their engagement with some or other creator (which you can decide to manually boost).
I mean I sure did. When Flattr was announced I loved the idea, and promised that I'd sign up the second I saw a flattr button on a blog post I liked.
I never once saw a Flattr button outside of brokep's own blog.
Yes, you can go into advanced settings and copy a payment proof. But then how do you get it to a retailer? What does the retailer do with it. It's not part of the normal consumer flow use case, and that tells me that people still think of it like a toy and not a serious tool.
In terms of privacy, I don’t see using Monero as different from using Cash.
But to your point of not being able to use btc normally, in everyday life. Sure, but it's chicken and egg. If artists start to make some serious satoshis, they will naturally look for a nice place to exchange, it will come.
Meanwhile, I can now listen to a music podcast, stream satoshis back, the satoshis are split between podcaster (DJ) and artist. If I boost (send some extra satoshis) during the playing of a song, it goes to that creator.
This is a nice example of such a podcast: https://podverse.fm/podcast/toxrW9Ju1
The comment just got me thinking of crypto currency in general as an alternative. If someone had something to say about Monero, they could see my comment and engage
It's tiresome hearing about crypto's fees, eco, and mining problems while there's a proven technology that's actually spam resistant and nearly consumer-grade actively working, right now.
Whatever comes after Patreon should be creator-owned like Nebula is to increase the level of accountability it has to its users on both sides.
Do the majority of creators want anonymity? I don't think so. They can set up a company and hide behind it if they do. Being an anonymous platform invites tax evasion and money laundering. Do you really want to deal with that?
Why would I open up an API so that competitors can swoop in? What benefit that would provide to me? No one will use API over UI.
The author clearly wants a donation platform that caters to a very niche group of users. I would guess there are less than 100 people in the world who want it (and do not need it)
You're completely misunderstanding their argument about pseudonymity. Patreon isn't magically exempt from KYC, they do have the real life identity of the creator. There's no legal reason why the patrons need to know everything that the company knows.
From the article:
> What that actually means is the platform has to allow creators (the people who charge money) to be pseudonymous (to use their stage name or pen names) in all of their interactions with their patrons (the people paying the money), and the platform, which is legally required to know the legal identity of the creator and have on file their relevant tax ID numbers (e.g. SSN in the US), needs to keep that legal identity confidential.
I have been working on a free Wordpress alternative that is built with React, and removes the guard rails and burdens for creators that WP creates.
https://github.com/elegantframework/elegant-cli
I have had requests to include Twitch like features such as tipping, subscriptions, and power ups.
I started planning out these features to get them into the development pipeline and I realized that some of these features are the value that Patreon creates.
Would developers/creators be interested in having subscription tiers, tips, power ups, rewards, etc, on their own website alongside their content?
I am currently working with a local creator who recently switched over to us; and we are piloting ways to level up his content on his domain by linking his Patreon account.
But as the author of the article mentioned, this creator goes by a stage name when he’s connecting with fans.
https://mankini.tv/interviews/mankini-interviews-buzz-osborn...
I'll set up a payment gateway with Stripe and whitelabel their subscription service to offer content creators a Patreon like experience on their own website, and post a SHOW HN for feedback.
Stay tuned : )
i.e. release the base product at a low price (or for free) and just give an option for users who really like it to donate you whatever they want, however many times they want.
I also stopped reading there. Scrolled down, an endless wall of text that served no purpose than for the writer to vent their frustration.
Neophilia is a progressive and incurable disease of venture capital. VCs aren't looking to build sustainable, profitable businesses. They are looking to buy entire market segments for later enshittification. Your job as a founder of a company asking for VC money is to construct a parallel state around your target market so that you can charge taxes on everyone in that market and that the VCs can sell the entire market to someone else for a huge profit (the "exit").
Jack Conte is very firmly an artist, and not a walking pile of technofeudalist money, so I can't help but look at this as a deal-with-the-devil scenario. Or at the very least, someone desperately trying and failing to keep the money on track. The VCs bought a payment bundler and want to turn it into a merch vendor, website host, etc.
I do think there are some specific details about Patreon's history and leadership that make it unusually bad at running an engineering organization, even for a VC-backed startup. It has some deceptively hard engineering problems and has struggled to attract, retain, and use technical leadership equal to those problems.
- Instead of 4-7% payment processing fees, it can be effectively zero[1]
- Instead of 8-12% fees (or 15% in case of Bandcamp), crypto industry standards tend to be in the 0-5% range. It’s not always clear to me as a creator and patron why such a significant amount of value needs to be captured for a digital asset sale.
- Users of the platform could be given more control such as forking the OSS protocol if the core devs go off the rails or try to extract more than what users feel it’s worth. This is especially interesting given the recent polarizing changes to Patreon and Bandcamp’s business structures.
- Settlement times can be measured in minutes or hours rather than days, weeks, or months.
- Anonymity and local-first data privacy could be achieved, at least theoretically. Practically, very few L2s have yet to reach complete privacy using zero knowledge proofs and related cryptography.
- Mitigating centralizing factors such as Patreon’s control over what is a morally acceptable revenue stream. Content like NSFW art might be currently acceptable, but this could change on a dime if the company decides to change its values.
Subscription and recurring payments are notoriously difficult in crypto, but “by-work” as the author puts it, i.e. “microtransactions per each published digital object” is already happening in crypto and with much lower rates than Patreon et al[2].
(also, you've missed all the points in the original article which crypto does not provide!)
The real feature of crypto is decentralization, which does not need to mean fraud—in the same way that end-to-end encryption does not only facilitate criminal behaviour.
On the opposite, you have ultra-centralized governance and zero democracy.
You should erase the idea from your head that cryptocoins bring anything valuable to the payment world.
Users (non-devs) have agency through the software they choose to run. If mainnet was seriously affected by some attack, users could choose to migrate to a healthier network run by honest nodes. This agency happens with every hard fork: the DAO, but also the PoS merge.
Of course still lying into the face of potential users about "decentralzing things" while trapping them into the platform - what a joke!
[1] https://www.patreon.com/en-GB/policy/community-guidelines
And as far as I remember, Patreon also had similar issues with terminating accounts of people that they (not judges !) have decided to have violated (IIRC) hate speech laws ? (This wouldn't be an issue if antitrust was working properly and Patreon hadn't become so big that alternatives aren't even on people's radars (GP's ignorance about Tipeee being an example), but here we are...)
You can't autobill.
Every time you want a payment, you need a signature from the sending wallet. The closest you can get is a smart contract where someone pre-loads a certain amount of money and it trickles out as the months/works roll out, but it will eventually deplete. Then what? Subscription over? Start the nagging emails?
It's not "set and forget" like a credit card where you settle the debt after the creator receives their payment.
There are disadvantages to using Layer 2 of a blockchain, and you are ignoring the costs of on-boarding and off-boarding from cryptocurrency.
> - Users of the platform could be given more control such as forking the OSS protocol if the core devs go off the rails or try to extract more than what users feel it’s worth. This is especially interesting given the recent polarizing changes to Patreon and Bandcamp’s business structures.
In this case you're speaking of doing Patreon on the blockchain, not merely using cryptocurrency transactions? How would that work and how wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to do with a public, possibly federated, server running a FOSS Patreon software?
> - Settlement times can be measured in minutes or hours rather than days, weeks, or months.
Are settlement times going down with FedNow? And even CC transactions take seconds, do the content creators care that much about getting the money immediately and isn't that a greater fraud risk?
> - Anonymity and local-first data privacy could be achieved, at least theoretically. Practically, very few L2s have yet to reach complete privacy using zero knowledge proofs and related cryptography.
I admit to not being familiar with the situation but aren't all transactions public on the blockchain? How that can be anonymous unless you're using something like Monero? And I'm not sure what local-first data there is, you meaning having the paywalled content downloaded to your device if you subscribe?
> - Mitigating centralizing factors such as Patreon’s control over what is a morally acceptable revenue stream. Content like NSFW art might be currently acceptable, but this could change on a dime if the company decides to change its values.
What about illegally acceptable revenue streams? How would such a platform stop being banned due to illegal content?
Yes, it's not a panacea, but has the potential to be far lower than the current status quo.
> In this case you're speaking of doing Patreon on the blockchain, not merely using cryptocurrency transactions? How would that work and how wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to do with a public, possibly federated, server running a FOSS Patreon software?
It can be both; using smart contracts to facilitate payments and identity, and some form of federated or decentralized protocol for communication and discovery (e.g. Farcaster).
> Are settlement times going down with FedNow? And even CC transactions take seconds, do the content creators care that much about getting the money immediately and isn't that a greater fraud risk?
Not everybody lives in the USA, and yes creators would likely appreciate lowering payout schedules from days to hours.
> I admit to not being familiar with the situation but aren't all transactions public on the blockchain?
Yes, like Monero but with smart contracts and verifiable computation via ZK-SNARKs. It is possible, but in its infancy: see Aztec and Aleo.
> What about illegally acceptable revenue streams? How would such a platform stop being banned due to illegal content?
The primary hosts can choose not to serve the illegal content; it would redirect the behaviour to alternative platforms. Similar to a popular Mastodon server choosing not to allow NSFW, but other servers might allow NSFW.
A person who is completely non-technical would be even less likely to use Crypto than me.
the port to fiat is the problem
someone somewhere will need to change USDC / USDT (eek) to fiat
either all visitors of the platform or the platform forms those relationships
this is the weakness of crypto enthusiasts’ arguments. they live in the world where crypto won and you can buy goods within their ecosystem.
this is simply not true… yet?
i’m actually a fan of crypto, but these naive or bond header arguments are not useful to convince anyone. it’s like saying you can lose weight eating mcdonald’s, you can but will most?
i’ve personally never had a problem with them or circle but my transaction volume is low. the normie can’t and won’t figure out the metamask to coinbase to fait part.
it’s painful for those deep in crypto let alone the average patron supporter
stop painting a rosy picture of shitty crypto ux
Still seems shady.
Still will never go near anything endorses or touched by Amanda Palmer.
You cannot do business and be anonymous. The tax man would eat you alive. At least outside of USA. You also need a license as sole proprietor or be incorporated as a company in order to make repetitive sales and not one-offs. So again, no anonymity whatsoever.
"by works" payment model is illegal. You can receive donations or have subscriptions or pay per view but you cannot "maybe deliver", "deliver maybe one work, maybe ten". Again, illegal as fuck.
"Non quid pro quo patronage" - again, donations solve this. They are legal and easy without any hustle, as long as the payee is aware what is the purpose of that payment.
"api / audience relation system" - well, i am trying to run a business, why in the world would i give api access to third parties without being able to monetize it? each api call costs me resources. nothing is free. not to mention that giving access to api might go against my financial business altogether by moving some financial transactions out of my business into foreign business that is monetizing my api.
Author is very naive in his complaints in general. The red tape you have to go through these days for a simple(it's not a rocket science) website is astronomical. The technological issues(like finding a bank with an actual api that works and does not charge you per payment is close to impossible) too are unending hurdles being thrown at you form left and right and the bigtech-monopolized internet does not want you in it competing with their services or NOT using their services and infrastructure to build yours. You think streaming video is free? Try finding a place to host the video and send it over the network for amount that your income can cover and allow you still to make a profit. Good luck.
Yes, i have solved all these issues. But it is so damn hard, that these complaints don't even scratch the surface of how impossible it is to start something serious in this monopolized era of the internet and red tape. You just have no idea. You don't.
Perhaps their other points are valid. Admittedly I don't know enough to tell.
How can Patreon allow it then? It's a real, existing thing. If you don't deliver, you don't get paid.
It's probably not a big source of their profit, and certainly a competitor can live without it. But as both a consumer and creator it's the only model I'm interested in. It really aligns everyone's incentives.
> I am not trying to copy Patreon. I am merely implementing the general idea of selling your digital content online. That's all.
You should stop posting, honestly. Either you tried to gather interest for your project by posting in a Patreon thread, or you've realized how little you actually know and you are backtracking.
Best to cut your losses, revisit what you are working on, make sure you have a clear path and you've verified it's what customers want, and build something you can show before talking about it.
This was you in the original post. If you consider Patreon a competitor, then you need to understand their business model far better than you apparently do. You don't need to copy them, but you do need to understand them. You cannot compete with an established company that you have given zero effort to understand.
The fact that you're having such a hard time understanding the difference between researching your competition and copying them is further proof that you aren't ready to be running a startup—you have a lot to learn about business before you're going to get anywhere. If you're dead set on continuing, it would be a good idea to learn a bit of humility and consider that maybe, just maybe, the dozen-or-so people on a startup forum telling you that you're wrong might know something you don't.
If you are making a platform you must make it universally usable. Just because one creator does not like or is missing some thing, you just cannot bend the platform to suit his needs. It just does not work like that.
Personally, I have solved the anonymity issue. It's not hard to do but it requires legal layering, which sounds way more complex than it actually is, but i don't want to get out my solution in here.
There is no anonymity between the creator and Patreon, or between Patreon and patrons. The anonymity is between the creator and the patrons.
I don't see any reason why this would be illegal, especially as Patreon does this in countless jurisdictions.
> "by works" payment model is illegal. You can receive donations or have subscriptions or pay per view but you cannot "maybe deliver", "deliver maybe one work, maybe ten". Again, illegal as fuck.
This is a model that Patreon already supports (again in countless jurisdictions), so unless their legal counsel is completely incompetent it can hardly be "illegal as fuck".
that is exactly the problem. You have two relationships here: author -> patreon and author -> patrons. The first one is irrelevant, the second on is the problematic one. You cannot be anonymous in one case and not in another. That is not how business, law or taxes work - anywhere. Just because patrons do not want to know the legal identity does not mean it is legal to hide it. You could get sued for tax avoidance like that.
As others have pointed out, Patreon does exactly this in many different jurisdictions. I find it hard to believe that they're just brazenly violating the law and absolutely nobody cares.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TISM
The key here is that neither Humphrey B. Flaubert nor Eugene de la Hot Croix Bun were filing tax returns via their nom de guerre's.
I already don't know any direct "wallet" information about the artist, and that's kind of the point - every direct micropayments approach since at least the mid-1990s has failed, so we have aggregation instead, otherwise we'd be spending more on the transaction than on the artist.
You need to maybe not try to replace patreon if you’re this clueless.
I believe that if someone with a patreon wants their identity to stay private, making an LLC (depending on the name of it) may backfire?
I can’t tell if you’re talking about the US though, if you’re referring to other countries it may be much more restrictive, lots of places seem to require ID and registration for basically anything.
Likewise, are you claiming that the "by works" model that patreon supports today is illegal?
As for the "non quid pro quo" case - as a patron I care about this one in particular - patreon does this (or at least only screws it up in minor ways), the article is just recommending that any alternative handle it too. Maybe your donation management approach handles this?
Finally, "api access to third parties without being able to monetize it" - the request isn't so much for third party access, as first party - primarily for artists, maybe optionally for patrons. (This one is a little less important if you have a broad enough range of artist-CRM options, but really, noone has before, api support for developers is a great way to let other people fail fast so you don't have to...) Also, the API in question is something slightly less sophisticated than "a single google sheet per artist", it's not going to be that expensive.
I'm definitely curious about what you come up with, especially if you get traction with artists - but only about half a dozen of the artists I support through patreon are outside the US anyway, so until you work out US support I'm probably not going to notice. Good luck, though.
As i commended elsewhere, if Patreon acts as the publisher, then yes. The authors are merely sub-contractors and their relationship with patrons is quite different.
> Likewise, are you claiming that the "by works" model that patreon supports today is illegal?
As I commented elsewhere, I might not have understood what the author has been describing and misinterpreted it.
The API question, based on your take, then needs to be expanded on. Too many variables here. Sound more to me like this is not an API question at all, but rather lack of functionality/forms/pages/lists on the front-end side?
> I'm definitely curious about what you come up with, especially if you get traction with artists - but only about half a dozen of the artists I support through patreon are outside the US anyway, so until you work out US support I'm probably not going to notice. Good luck, though.
It will have no geo-restriction so who ever comes will be welcome. Frankly, I am not looking to get millions of users. I will be satisfied if it pays for itself and people's salaries and author get alternative means of communicating with their fans, or the world, in this modern era of censorship and political correctness. My setup if very different from the one bigtech uses, so I hope that will be what will attract people there. I have been working on this for a year with about 5 month break. It will be out next year.
I've been using Patreon this way since it launched in 2013, and I am pretty sure they have grown to the point where it is impossible for the only reason they get away with it is that they are too small for anyone to say "hey this is illegal, you have x months to stop doing this before we come down on you".
"why would I give API access without being able to monetize it"
It is worth noting that Patreon was created by a musician with the intent of being a service for artists/musicians/etc, and still occasionally acts like this instead of a purely profit-driven corporate entity whose primary duty is making its shareholders rich. The CEO is still that musician, though I think his musical output has fallen off a lot as "running a system of money pipes" took over his life. Patreon makes a lot of choices that look weird from a purely monetary viewpoint because of this.
Does not appear to be the case? Jack is pumping out music at an insane rate.
If you mean quality wise, that is a lot harder to judge objectively. Subjectively I like his new stuff, and his new band the Scary Pockets is doing well popularity wise.
Hosting video, even yourself, has been a solved problem for years now :
https://framablog.org/2022/12/13/peertube-v5-the-result-of-5...