Community Poll Results - (Conversation Continued) (Patreon)

Thank you so much everyone for voting and sharing some amazingly useful comments on the last poll :) You guys brought up a lot of points that I didn't even consider before,  I never considered things like people hopping onto Patreon just to download all the models and then hopping off quickly afterwards. Or the gumroad style option with a recommended level of donation and no cap- Really helped, thank you -

So, here are my thoughts after looking at the votes and reading the comments.
On one hand, my logic for the first option (Free On Release) was by making the characters free for a limited window upon completion, our audience would feel more invested in each video of us creating the character step by step because they knew they would reap the benefits of the creation process at the end. This would lead to more views, more subs, and the growing of the community. The cons to this are it will more than likely be impossible to stop anyone from getting the Characters illegally because there will be so many people who have them for free to begin with, and as some of you rightly pointed out, the vast majority of our audience will likely get them on that Release window only. Also, we run the risk of our Characters being associated with all the negative ideas of "Free" such as "Low-Quality", "Glitchy", "Unpolished", and "Unprofessional", etc.

On the other hand for the second voted option (Promo Characters are Free, the rest are Gumroad style), this option allows people to have Permanent access to a FULLY functional and high quality model. This has the potential to establish itself as "THE Go-To Character" for new 3D artists to test out, learn from, and ponder checking out others like it. It's possible that we here on Patreon could vote on a new Promo character every 6 months or so. The rest would be on Gumroad or something, and Patrons would receive discounts based on their tier for the rest, but the Promo character would always be free for the community. (This could also benefit our Advertising, as each time the Promo character changes, we could change our Banner here on Patreon and Youtube to whichever Promo Character was voted last lol)
The con to this option is it might be harder for the average viewer on YouTube to get excited about a character we are building if they know they won't be able to get their hands on it free.

Ideally, it would be nice if I could give rewards to Patrons based on how long they have been a member. Unfortunately Patreon (as far as I know) doesn't offer any way for me to set that sort of perk up, and this would mean in order to deliver that kind of perk, I would have to personally spend my time checking how long each member has been around and messaging them with their reward when the time comes. Sadly I don't think I would be able to make enough time to carry out such a perk, especially as our Squad here grows :( I REALLY hope Patron will add an automated feature like a file I could attach that all Patrons who have been here for 6 months could have access to or something - Until then, it's a rough a shot-

I'm still not completely sure yet, probably take a few more days before I come to a conclusion, but those are my thoughts on the matter so far. Feel free to bounce any more thoughts and opinions in the comments off of this post. Really enjoyed reading the last few :)