Upcoming Patreon Changes (Patreon)

So, cat's out of the bag, NDA's lifted, and finally I can discuss this .

A few months ago I was in an interview about some upcoming Patreon changes.

Up front I'm going to mention that this does not  impact existing pages. This page will not see anything different.

 A lot of people are going to be in a panic over this on twitter so I want to address this here to try and assuage some fears.

Basically, Patreon is implementing different plans for new pages.

At the moment, pages have their payment processor fees, and then a 5% fee to Patreon. Processor fees are a bit erratic but are batched together at the end of the month.

The upcoming plans are for different sizes of creators and are as follows:

Lite

• 5% fee
• no tiers
• basically just a tipjar (though hypothetically you could export your patron list via the API and just manage it with your own script to do rewards)
• This is functionally identical to most of the competition, such as Subscribestar.

Pro

• 8% fee (5% for existing pages)
• Includes tiers (and fluff like 'customer support' and webinar things)
• Identical to a basic patreon page now

Premium

• 12% fee (9% for existing pages), minimum of a $300 cut a month (so you need to make at least $2500 a month on your page)
• Group / team page management
• Patreon can handle merch distribution for physical rewards
• Obviously meant for very select few individuals

They're also changing their fee structure again. This is honestly the biggest point of contention. Again, this only applies to new pages.

• For pledges between $1 to $3: 5% + 15 cents
• For pledges $3 and up: 2.9% + 30 cents

The fee rates here are not absurd like they were December 2017. The caveat here is that these payments will be immediate, not batched. For patrons, this doesn't affect anything, but for pages, it'll mean more individual fees. This is part of the problem from 2017's payment fee changes that were veto'd (with the exception that pages are responsible for the fees entirely).

That all said, this is actually where Patreon still has an advantage versus competition. The smaller fee for smaller pledges actually make Patreon Lite identical to other platforms like Subscribestar, but with a slightly lower fee. (Most competition is per-pledge fee.)

Existing pages meanwhile still are able to batch their payments, reducing processor fees. (I feel like Patreon should lean into this as a big advantage over competition.)

I am trying to suggest the idea of pro-rating payments to the forums so that way Patreon can continue to batch processor fees for new pages. It doesn't seem like a good idea to change the model in a way that lets Paypal / Stripe just take a bigger chunk, and batch processing was one advantage to using Patreon over being independent.

Again, just to reiterate: these changes will not affect existing Patreon pages. They have been adamant about that fact. This'll only affect new pages, and, while not totally positive changes, are also not entirely terrible / the worst things ever. A lot of people are going to have an exceptionally negative reaction to this (and this is something I warned about in the interview with them), but all of it is opt-in.  The worst thing is the processor fee changes for new pages (not the 5%/8% change, tbh). And some of the proposals are actually good (for the few creators who'd use the Premium tier, that's actually a pretty good thing for instance.)

If you've wanted to make a Patreon page or are considering it in the future, do so now so you can get founder status. You can get this status as long as you register before May.