Survey Follow-up - About subscriptions (Patreon)

This is a bit of a long read, and primarily of interest to anyone who has questions about the 'per creation' and 'monthly' subscription types, and what my views on those are!

So far 30 people have answered the survey I posted last night, and the results have been mostly on the positive side. I will tell more about the results in detail later when enough people have participated.

In the meantime, I want to talk about the subscription types Patreon allows creators to setup for their campaign, 'per creation' and 'monthly', as some people have been confused about how exactly these work. And about why I prefer 'per creation'.

The 'monthly' subscription is a fixed fee of your choice that you pay every month, regardless of what the creator does. While your subscription is active, you get to see all the posts that your chosen pledge tier allows you to see. If your monthly payment gets rejected because of card or bank issues, you may lose access to those posts until the payment is cleared. Otherwise you are always clear to see the posts your pledge tier is eligible for for the next month.

The 'per creation' subscription that I've primarily chosen to use is also charged once a month, at the start of a month, and the amount depends on the number of paid posts the creator has posted during the previous month. In my case, a paid work can be a fully colored work, a finished comic page or in rare cases a batch of simpler works. For example, if you have subscribed by $1 and I post three paid works during a month, you are charged $3 at the start of next month. You can set a monthly maximum for your subscription, which is basically a limit to how much you are willing to pay in total for a month. So, with the example of $1 pledge and $3 monthly max, if I were to post 5 works, you would only be charged $3. As far as I'm aware, hitting the monthly max during a month doesn't prevent you from accessing patron-only posts of your pledge tier that are posted after reaching the limit. (If anyone has different experiences, please do correct me.)

The reason that I've chosen 'per creation' as my setup until now has been because I've had dry months here and there when I don't post anything, and I don't want to receive money for doing nothing. (There's also a legality issue here with my country's laws on crowdfunding, but I'll talk about that in another post later.) Now, if I were to start doing art for a living, I could easily post new works on fairly regular basis, so you might think a monthly fee would be better. In theory, yes, but it also means that I would lose incentive to do art beyond what the monthly subscription is worth. Even if I do extra, I don't get anything in return, except maybe by luck someone might up their pledge by a buck or two. With the 'per creation' setup, I still get money from anyone who hasn't hit their monthly max yet, and I can always see on Patreon how much that would be. I can then consider whether the time investment is worth it, or whether I should do something else, like an art commission for someone. And since I would need to make enough money every month to fund this new job, having more options to rely on for my income is better. There are surprisingly many patrons who don't have a monthly max set or it is set high, so posting extra works might very well be the more profitable choice.

Also, from my experiences with shifting between 'per creation' and 'monthly', I haven't seen a real difference between what people are willing to pledge. Even if I've said I'll post an extra work a month, and switch to a monthly subscription, the difference in pledges has been negligible, like 10-20% increase. I'm not sure if this is because of some psychological aspect or what, but a monthly subscription just hasn't looked like a profitable choice at any point.

And those are the main reasons why I've chosen to go with 'per creation'. It incentivizes me to go beyond planned limits, gives patrons the chance to reward me for the extra works if they so wish, and will give me more options to fund myself if I go full-time with art. And let's face it, if I do art as a full-time job, I need to have a more capitalistic view on things.

Also, as a sidenote, I did mention in the survey that I might have rewards like extra content for those who pledge for every work during a month, but let me clarify that there would be a reasonable limit here, like 3-4 works, so even if your monthly max is capped at that amount and I post more works, you'll still get to see those extras. It's simply an extra incentive for patrons to maybe up their monthly max a tiny bit to ensure they'll see the bonus content. Do note that I'm not 100% sure if I'd do this yet, but it's one feature I've had in mind.

That's it on subscription types. Feel free to chime in your opinions. Expect more follow-up banter on my plans in the coming days.

Also, the exclusive content archive will be updated today or tomorrow at latest, so expect a message in your inbox very soon! I'm sure a few new patrons are getting antsy for their access to all the goodies. ;)