Patreon Changes Fees instead of fixing anything (Patreon)

I just wanted you to know Patreon is changing how their fees work. It is a terrible choice. What used to happen is if you pledge for a $1 I got roughly .63. The rest went to Patreon and Credit Card companies in processing fees. I'm fine with this because it's something myself and really any artist or small business person knows about. That level is set up with me knowing I will get less than a dollar. 

Patreon wants to change their fees so I get $0.95 of every dollars which sounds nice until they said where they are making up the different. Now every $1 is actually getting charged $1.40. 

Also Credit Card companies fee people per charge and you only get charged once for all your pledges. So why do you need to be charged for each pledge? Well it's so Patreon can pocket the money. 

If you want to see a fuller explanation. You can read this breakdown

http://www.pretty-terrible.com/funny-money-patreon-style/ 

It seems like this whole system is designed to punish people who can only give a $1 and those who want to gives dozens of people a $1 rather than one person all their money. 

Edit: Small addition. This is also extra bad for the $1 people because I can edit the $5 to be $4.50 and get it close to $5 again but $1 is the lowest a level I can set. 

So I completely understand if you want to jump ship on Patreon. 

I personally will be closing my patreon as soon as I can join D.rip. Drip is basically Kickstarter's version of Patreon. Its in an invite only beta right now. I have been frustrated with Patreon since it started because it took them a long time to fix things and is still missing a lot of basic stuff. Where as Kickstarter  has implemented mine and other peoples suggests fairly quickly. Everytime I've run a kickstarter the back end looked different. 

But this new change by Patreon shows their priorties aren't with helping creators like they claim. They mostly care about the already famous and in particular the already famous on Youtube. 

I've been on Patreon for 4 years. 

- It wasn't until last year I could schedule a post. 

- It wasn't until last year that I could have more than one image in a post

- I charge people as soon as they back to prevent people pledging taking all the content and then leaving before being charge. But that feature is in "beta" so have the creators have it and the other half don't. It's been only half implemented for 2 years. 

- The search function doesn't work well on Patreon. Here's a few searches and what they turn up. My friend Amanda did a test yesterday. Searching her name turns up nothing even though she has two Patreon's.  

When she searches "Queer comics" the results are a little better but only show people who put queer comics in that clickable link (aka where I put comics). So Searching Magical Girls won't show you stuff even though I explain Misfits of Avalon on my patreon's front page. Supernatural won't lead you to me even though I say it a shit ton on my front page. 

- Also you can't browse on Patreon. If you click explore creators, you get a list of categories and then "Popular this week." When you click a catagory you get:

The top 20. But no one past that. So you can't find new people on Patreon. That might not sound like a big deal to you but I've done 12 Kickstarters and talked to other comic folks that do Kickstarters. And the stats we get from Kickstarter tell us usually between 24-35% of our funds come from people already on kickstarters website. People do browse it. Because some people just like to help out Indy creators in general. So why can't I browse Patreon and find a new werewolf/urban fantasy comic to throw a $1 at for a few months?

- Also you can't upload more than one picture at a time. Right now you can make an image post with only one picture or you can make a text post where this icon pops up at the start of new paragraphs

But clicking it again only lets me put in one image. So no gallery system if I want to put a lot of pictures up with only one sentence like "Here's all the photos I took for reference"

- Also the tech the announce is frequently broken or not ready. So why did they announce it was available? A few months ago they announced this app to let Patreon integrate with a wordpress site.  But when I click the link to install it and give it a try, I'm lead to this page telling me oh wait this doesn't work yet sorry 

Everything I have listed (except the app because it is brand new) I have reported to them as things that need fixing since I got on the site. So have other people. But rather than working on things that will make creators easier to back, they have decided on this new fee structure which will make creators harder to support. 

So I'm jumping ship on Patreon as soon as Drip is available to me and I once again understand if any of you Patreon backers are jumping ship before then. 

Here is a link to my newletter if you want to know when I make the switch.  

In the meantime I'm testing out a subscription thing that isn't on Patreon.