Capped Pledges - All the Information (Patreon)

UPDATE 10/11 - Patreon has informed me of a way to identify the capped pledges. There is a piece of text in the pledge manager that has it hidden under a roll over. 

Thanks to this, I'm able to identify that out of the 1150 Angelarium members, only 18 of them account for the majority of the problem, so I'm moving this conversation privately to them.

If you aren't getting DMs from me, you are all good.

Thanks for all the support!

Best,

-Pete

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Hey guys,

The last post had some comments from people who were put off by my request for you all to remove pledge caps. I wanted to take a second to explain the situation to demystify how this whole system works and to clarify my request.

When you are charged and for how much

Patreon bills everyone monthly. Despite the fact that this campaign is "per creation", the billing happens on a set schedule on the first of every month. With campaigns like this one, it charges members multiple times, once for each "paid post" created that month. For Angelarium, that means that I flag each finished painting as a "paid post" and the system counts those at the start of every month to determine how many times to charge everyone. Sometimes that's once, sometimes it's twice and occasionally that number is zero.

Why and how to set monthly pledge caps

The system where creators charge "per creation" is pretty simple, but it leaves a loophole for abuse. To close that loophole, members have the option to cap their total monthly pledge. It gets confusing because you don't specify the number of creations to cap it at, you specify a dollar amount. Since I sometimes post twice in a month, anyone wanting to safely cap their pledge should set the cap to double their base pledge amount. That means, if you are pledging at $10, the cap should be no lower than $20. 

This is especially important with tiers for physical rewards because which rewards are paid for and which are not is not made clear to us by Patreon's system. If someone pledges $75 and caps their pledge at $75, I don't have a solution for what to mail them in a month with 2 paintings. I can't even see that they've done it until after the payment clears.

My mistake

This month, I am making 2 paid posts because a glitch made Patreon count zero paid posts in September. This shouldn't be an issue because it's normal for me to make 2 posts in a month. Except, we just noticed that $2000 worth of pledges are capped at paying only once per month. Many of them are likely to be the ones receiving prints, which is the real danger.

In an attempt to communicate that you should not cap your pledges too low, I asked people to just trust me and remove the cap altogether. It seemed easier than asking people to "cap their pledges at double their base pledge amount", because out of context, that's super confusing. Some people were upset by the request and I want to apologize. I don't need you to remove the safety buffer from your pledge, I was just trying to avoid writing a massive post explaining how Patreon's billing system works.

2 paintings per month

Beyond this month's mishap, I want to clear this up because I'm going to be ramping up my art production again next year and make 2 paintings per month the standard. If that's the case, I want to make sure that people understand how this works. To prepare for this, please set your budget and pledge caps to account for two posts per month. That will help fix this month's problem and get you set for new art coming next year.

As always, my assistant Matt Girouard is the guy you email if you have questions you want answered privately. You can reach him at MohrbacherArt@gmail.com

Otherwise, feel free to leave a comment. Since this is a serious and confusing issue, I'm going to be paying extra attention to the feedback here.

Best,

-Pete