Tier Update *IMPORTANT* (Patreon)

I've finally made my decision on how the tiering will be handled from now on.

I'm getting rid of the $3 and $10 tiers, and creating a more standard $5 and 7$ tier.


I'll explain the simpler one first: the $10 tier.

It seems like a high price, very greedy to charge just to view a few AI stories.
To those who don't know however, I was offering full commissions to anyone who wanted one in the $10 tier. Commissions were oringally supposed to be a 5-10 image short story, but I ended up making 20, 30, and 72 image comics out of patron requests. Mostly because I liked the idea, but also because I didn't feel like the story could be done justice in 5-10 images.
I haven't offered commissions for the last couple months because of my living situation, but, even with the hiatus, I still have 2 or 3 requests on the table. For a while it seemed like I was going to perpetually be behind on requests for the entirety of my time as an AI Captioner.

With that in mind, I have decided to put a hold on commissions indefinitely.

I'll finish the commissions I said I would, (I've talked to you guys already you know who you are :)) but going forward the $10 tier will be abolished because I feel the price can no longer be justified by "early access comics" alone.
In it's place, a $7 tier will be created that has "early access" as it's only benefit over other Patrons.

Maybe I'll keep the $10 tier around in case anyone feels like donating though.
A lot of you guys were supporting me in that tier without even asking for commissions. Which I really appreciate and hope that I satisfied your expectations.


As for the $3 tier, there are a few reasons why I'm charging more now.

Time:
The $3 price was originally a reflection of the low effort I went through to generate images. I only dwelled on seeds for a few minutes and didn't do much editing. I didn't even caption back then.
I tried to make the tier as $2 originally, but Patreon itself told me that most artists undercharge for their work and recommended $3 to me.
Now that so much more of my time goes into this, if I don't get more for my time then I won't be able to continue going at this level.
Also, I'd like to be able to do this full-time eventually. This is one step towards that.

Quality:
Not only is NovelAI providing higher quality AI and larger resolution size, but my editing has evolved in leaps and bounds. I probably do things very inefficiently, but I'm extremely meticulous for even images that aren't really important. (Which isn't a good thing in actuality. Clothes inconsistencies on setup pages really aren't that important I feel, but I still fix them anyways...)

Most kissing scenes are made by combining at least 4 images made from the same seed highlighting differently body parts or clothes. Like if I can't generate bra straps on the garment without changing the shirt I like, I just generate seperate images for the shirt and the bra. The car kissing scene in the Ash's Big Gamble (spoiler) needed separate images for Gary's necklace, shirt, and top hair spikes, while Ash's skirt needed to have it's color changed entirely, and needed separate images for the bra straps, center frills, left arm sleeve, and facial expression. Thats 9 layers of images that need to be cleaned up and blended into the same image seamlessly. Which isn't too difficult, but very time consuming and a good example of what I go through to make the scene look good!

Lifestyle:
I would like to make enough doing this to support my life style. If I could eventually make 1.5-2k a month doing this, than I can afford to do it full-time and provide much more content to you guys! The reason I was able to make part 1 and 2 of the Ash story within such a close time-frame was that I'm taking some time off to housesit right now, and I have a lot of time to focus on editing.

I would really like to be the guy that can put out a 30+image story every 4-5 days, because I like doing it. I don't want to be the guy from March who could only upload 2-3 times in the whole month.


In conclusion, due to my change in commission policy and the increased time and quality in my images, I'm changing the tiers to $5 and $7 respectively.

I'm going to try and move you guys to those tiers automatically, but $10 backers might want to double check at the end of the month that they aren't still there by mistake. That $10 tier will just be "Donation Tier" afterwards.