A little update on Patreon stuff (Patreon)

Hey all. Been a while since posting any sort of news or general talk. With some new features coming to Patreon, it's important that I mention a few things. This whole post is basically about money and currencies. It's a bit long, but I hope you'll find the time to read it.

Multiple Currencies

If I've understood correctly, starting next month you can subscribe (or 'pledge') to creators in three currencies, EUR, USD and GBP. Patreon automatically adjusts the tier prices to some sort of rough equivalent for each currency. 

While I know there are a fair share of people with EUR or GBP as their local currency and would prefer to use that currency, please note that Patreon hasn't yet made multiple currencies available to creators for their payouts, meaning that in my case, if you were to, for example, pay in EUR, Patreon would convert it to USD, and then I'd have to convert is back to EUR when I withdraw the money. Each conversion takes a 2.5% cut. So if you want to ensure that I can keep as much of the money you throw my way as possible, please keep pledging in USD if possible, until Patreon makes the same currencies available for payouts as well, so there's never a need for double conversion. It should be coming in near future, but no details beyond that. I will make a post about that as soon as it happens.

About Annual Memberships and financial situation

Patreon has really been advertising this for creators lately. Creators can now enable annual payments for pledges. So patrons could pay for an entire year at once. The reason I haven't enabled this option is simply because I can't say if I'm still in business a year from now. The level of my income as it is would mean I won't be. Honestly, I'm not making enough. Paying a year in advance would mean I have a bunch of money now, but when I'd run out, my monthly income would be even less at that time and I'd be even more screwed. I'd rather have solid recurring income that I can keep track of than random spikes and lows.

With that said, I haven't given up on full-time artist work yet. I'm going to try various things for the next few months. First thing is adding an extra $150 tier slot, which I did recently. This will unfortunately mean that one more of my monthly artworks will be a request, instead of fully my own idea, but I'm going to work with these patrons to ensure requests don't veer too much outside my usual stuff.

I'd still need to make about $200-300 more per month to be stable for next year though, so I may need to do even more requests/commissions if nothing else works.

Most Efficient Way to Support Me

Some of you have asked me which platform gives me the biggest share of your money when subscribing to. The three services I'm on currently are Patreon, SubscribeStar and Gumroad. I'm still in the process of receiving my first payout from SubscribeStar, and there may be further bank transfer fees involved, but even without those, I believe the order is:

1. Gumroad
2. Patreon
3. SubscribeStar

Please note that the difference between Gumroad and Patreon is currently negligible. I keep about 90% overall, though on pledges/purchases below $5 the percentage shrinks, to about 60% at $1, because of flat transaction fees. Basically, $1 pledges are extremely inefficient, and so I highly recommend the $3 tier. (I'm actually considering combining the $1 and $3 tiers into a single $2 tier, but the logistics of getting everyone to switch tier could get troublesome, and I'd probably lose a few patrons in the process. I might do a poll about this later.)

Gumroad also doesn't have Discord integration, and posting stuff to customers is limited to 4 per month on a free account, so the subscriptions are currently basically just delivery of a monthly archive. HOWEVER, if I were to move to a premium account, which costs $10 per month for me, I'd get unlimited posts and Gumroad would take 5% less on my sales/subscriptions! So Gumroad has huge potential to be the most efficient if enough people would use it. My sales on Gumroad as it is pretty much justify the premium account already, so I'm definitely considering investing there.

SubscribeStar unfortunately has no good payout options for me, so getting the money from them to my bank account involves several fees, which reduces the final amount a fair a bit, compared to the others. It's still a decent option, but not as efficient.

End of month

As usual, now that the month is coming to an end, I'm sending everyone a compilation of this month's content from your subscription tier. Expect a message shortly.

That's all for now, I think. I have a feeling I forgot something though, so there may be a follow-up article soon. ^^;