About Patreon's New Fee Structure... (Patreon)

So Patreon announced a change to their fee structure that's panicking a lot of people. (Note this isn't implemented quite yet; if it goes into effect, you wouldn't be charged differently until January 1st. For Per-post campaigns it starts december 18th.)

Basically they're changing it so the Payer (you) pays a flat fee of $0.35 + 2.9% in order to give the Payee (me) exactly 95% of the pledged amount, every time. This makes payments actually consistent (they are currently not) and gives the creator more for every pledge.

The Problem

The main (or perhaps, only) problem is that while this change is very nice for higher pledges, $1 pledges get hit the hardest; and $1 pledges are the single most popular amount on my page, and I would wager, all of Patreon, by a lot.

At pretty much any amount other than $1 I think the change is pretty good; the Payee gets more extra money under the change than the Payer pays in extra, and everyone gets more peace of mind knowing that a $1 pledge is...well it's still $0.95, but it's within a rounding error of $1. Currently I get between 80% and 88% of my pledged amount after the fees.

A secondary (but related) issue is the new fee is per-pledge where currently if you pledge to 10 different people the fee per pledge is a bit smaller since you're charged once. I don't really understand why this was changed; it seems like charging the payment fee once per payer makes the most sense by far, and I wonder how much the $1 issue could be reduced if this weren't the case.

What's To Be Done?

So for now there's a big backlash and it's unknown how Patreon will react to it. Personally, I think the new fee structure would be perfectly fine if they can somehow address the $1 situation. I think there's a number of ways to deal with that; let people subscribe for a year at a time and only pay the 35 cents once a year instead of twelve times, have an alternate fee structure for $1 pledges, let the payer choose which fee/let the payee choose which types of fees they'll accept.

There's lots of talk of moving to Drip, Kickstarter's currently invite-only Patreon competitor, leaving Patreon, etc. I don't really have the luxury of up and moving over something that's not even a done deal, so I'll definitely be staying until I figure out what the deal is.

Other Ways To Support 

For now, if the fee ends up being a big problem, I'll note there's other ways to support me and I totally understand if this is a problem for you. You can support me monetarily by:

PayPal 

YouTube Sponsorship (paid sub)  (Sponsor button)

or YouTube "Superchat" (one time donation) (Dollar button)

Shopping on Humble Bundle (affiliate link) 

My Amazon Influencer Store 

Shopping on Amazon with my affiliate link 

So for now I'm just sitting this out and I don't expect to change too much either way (at least not in a way I have any control over!), I do really hope this $1 pledge situation gets figured out though.