Important: Your Money (Patreon)

I worked all Thursday on this, and I'll make this short and easy to understand, but if you want more in depth, it's there. If you read anything, please read "Full Transparency."

New Sales Tax Requirements, effective July 1st, 2020

Patreon announced that they are being required by law to start adding sales tax to more patron pledges starting on July 1st, 2020. This affects patrons in some parts of the US and 15 other countries (see list).

What did I do (short version)?

I spent Thursday setting up Advance Tax Settings for each and every tier of our Patreon page. The TLDR of this, you should NOT see a difference in your pledges, but depending on your state and country, you may see between a $0.20 – $0.50 increase of your total pledge if you pledge of $5.00. 

What does this look like? My calculations would be instead of Patreon charging you $16.00 a month to support me, the new total after July 1st, would be about ~ $16.40 a month, but keep in mind that less than half of all patrons will be charged sales tax.

What did I do (long version)?

If you want to read about Advance Tax Setting, you can do so here. Ultimately, most things I give you access to doesn't cost actual money, like a shirt or an apple would, hence they shouldn't be taxable unless your State/Country says. For Slack access, I would put a $1 value on, and it's up to your State/Country to decide to tax something such as "community access," which is what Patreon lists Slack/Discord as.  

Here is an example: $1 goes to "community access" and the other $1 goes to "general support," both according to Patreon, should not be taxable. If we look at the $5 level, we can break that down into $1 for "community access," and $1 to "bonus content" and then "$3 to general support," so again, none of this should be taxable too. 

Things such as VIP treatment, being on my friends list, voting power, and behind the scenes are also things that Patreon believes are not taxable, but Patreon cannot guarantee how all 50 States and other Countries treat this, but my calculations still put this at no more than a $1 increase to your current pledges above $16 tier. 

Full Transparency (read me)

If you support other Patreon creators and they did not contact you about this, they may be costing you money that they could have helped saved you.

Patreon provided plenty of time and constant reminders to help creators save you money. If a creator did not manually update their rewards in the last 60 days, they could be costing you extra money for no reason. 

Patreon made this transparent, they have constantly reminded creators, and they worked hard to build a system on the backend designed so you don't see a spike in the cost of your pledges come July 1st. 

Your support means the world to me, so spending an entire day to save you money was worth both my time and attention. 

Thank you for the continued support and do not hesitate to contact me if something doesn't seem right after July's charges. 

If you have any questions regarding this or anything else, feel free to reach out. 

Best, Steve