Patreon Tax Update (Patreon)

Hey all, so I woke up earlier this evening (I have fully embraced my vampirism, as evidenced by me writing this post at 2:30 in the morning and considering it a 'perfectly decent time' to make an announcement) to an e-mail from Patreon regarding updates coming to their payment methods in the near future.

The skinny is that they are legally required to charge sales tax starting in July.

Now, those of you in the EU have already been dealing with Patreon charging the VAT tax on Patreon transactions, and if you are in the EU, then nothing's gonna change for you. Sucks that you have to deal with it in the first place (especially considering that the VAT for a 'luxury' item like custom artwork is pretty exorbitant from what I understand), but at least nothing will change on your end.

For those of us living in other regions, this will affect your payments starting 2 months from now.

The degree to which it will affect your payments is gonna be determined by region: in my state, it's 6%, but it's not determined by the seller's location, it's determined by the client's, so whatever sales tax is in your area, that's what it's gonna be, anywhere from 4-11% in the US, I believe.

Now there is a silver lining to this: different regions are going to be determining what counts as 'taxable' differently. Some will only consider physical goods taxable, others consider digital goods taxable, and some, for absolutely inane reasons that I cannot understand, will count practically anything (including stuff like access to a discord server, shoutouts/acknowledgments, and early access to work) as taxable. Exactly which regions count what as which, I have no idea.

But Patreon is going to allow me to customize exactly what on my reward tiers is considered a tangible reward.

For example: I send out physical copies of my comics for anyone at 5$ a month, but I only do that once or twice a year (I mean... I'm TRYING to get faster at it, I promise, but at the moment, it's not a 1-to-1 payment-to-comic ratio). This means that the majority of the money you guys are paying me at that tier is not actually going towards the physical reward, but instead is to support me and what I do in general, which is not considered taxable anywhere.

I'm going to do everything I can to minimize the impact that this has on you guys by marking as much of my content in this way as possible.

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In addition, this might make for some major shakeups in how my reward tiers are arranged. Y'all may have noticed that I've, uh... fallen a bit behind on my commission to-do list, and I manage to keep screwing myself over in one way or another, hamstringing my ability to catch up. I may very well be cutting down on the number of patron-reward commissions I do in general, since they are 100% going to be considered taxable and I can't exactly worm my way out of it. In response, of course, I'll be upping the number of commissions I take outside of the platform, hopefully keeping my output roughly the same.

However, I wanna come up with better ways to reward you guys for supporting me here, especially with Gates of Hell taking off (Seriously you guys I am SO excited about that project, you have no idea it's going to be insaaaane), and having you guys here for that is something I want to acknowledge, reward, and focus on.

So, I'm going to A: try to get that whole discord integration thing to work this time, and B: see if I can come up with fun things to do as reward tiers. Initial ideas include: A monthly or perhaps bi-monthly patron-only request stream, more in-progress works and/or tutorials on how I do what I do, and a monthly or bi-weekly illustration where you guys get to vote on the topic.

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Let me know what you guys think of those ideas, let me know if you have any other ideas, call me an idiot for fucking up my sleep and/or work schedule as badly as I have, etc. etc.

Please, seriously, I value you guys' feedback a lot, and I've always been really bad about posting enough on here outside of simply putting up finished projects. I need to get better about that. Let me know what you want to see out of me on this platform, and I'll do my damnedest to make it happen.