[META] Vote - Charge Up Front? (Patreon)

[This post has been translated by locally sourced british speakers, just to make it easier to understand, because the topic is quite complicated]

Hi there everyone!

Thanks for your support last month! I honestly never expected to receive so much support - both in terms of your feedback, your likes, comments, and favorites, and in terms of money - and it is always an honor to make stuff that you guys enjoy! I'm working on part two of the synth x protogen animation, and after that we should have some lycanroc stuff. I also want to do some 2D absols and some felines too... There's so much I want to do!!

With that said, I have a controversial decision to make, and for that, I wanted to ask you guys what you think. I'm sorry to interrupt your normal porn stream with gritty financial stuff, but at the same time, I don't want to make changes without asking you guys first.

My patreon does NOT charge people when they join. Instead, it adds them to a list of people to charge at the 1st of the NEXT month. If the person then removes their pledge before the end of the month, they are removed from that list, and effectively have got the content of the patreon for free. HOWEVER, the 'amount earned per month' statistic shown on the main page doesn't update until that patreon fails to pay their next bill to ANOTHER creator. The result of this is that even though you see ~$2000 in the "amount per month" at the moment, that's not actually true: last month, over $500 worth of pledges were made and then removed before the month ended, but taxes and platform fees are calculated based on this origional $2000 figure; the reality is that $500 of that wasn't paid, but was taxed; Instead, I received about $1000

This is still waayyyy more than I ever expected, BUT it doesn't seem very fair to you guys, since it means some people have been gaming the system to get for free something that you've paid for.

Patreon does offer a feature called 'Charge Up Front' (CUF), which means people will be charged for their pledge the moment they make it. This would stop the problem, but the downside is that if someone pledges $5 on, say, the 27th of the month, they'll pay $5 on the 27th, and then $5 AGAIN two or three days later on the 1st of the next month. This also doesn't seem very fair on that person.

Another thing to consider is that once I've enabled Charge Up Front, I can't disable it.

I can't decide what would be better, and since you guys are the ones paying me to do this, I think it's reasonable to ask you guys what to do. If there was an option that meant that people simply had to make a minimum of one payment even if they remove their pledge, I'd go for that. Unfortunately, despite asking for this feature from patreon, it is not available.

So, what would you do? Do I enable charge up front? Or only charge at the end of the month? Please vote, and leave a comment letting me know what you think about this as well.