An Aside: How do Patreon Fees work? (Patreon)

(Addendum: I should clarify that this is primarily the aspect of processing stuff through Paypal for an example; the specific chunk that Patreon takes for itself is another one besides the focus of this. So, first the ~2.9%+0.30 comes out from your pledge (that goes to Paypal), then I have another 5% that gets taken based on the pre-processing fees total by the end of the month and that belongs to Patreon.)

Momentary "totally different from the norm" post! I'll also post a similar thing on Twitter tomorrow just so it's out there 'cuz I see just mentions but visuals I think are more valuable.

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Since it was brought as a question and it's something I've actually been doing a look into for a good while, and is kind of a funky aspect, I thought I'd actually put something together a little more visual on how Patreon fees work!

Some people've mentioned it on and off on Twitter but usually only when mentioning the difference of $1 vs $2 as a base, which while I've decided I'll eventually address that myself, for a bunch of reasons I'm gonna wait a good while longer so nothing anyone should be concerned about for a good bit.

Anyways, the tl;dr is aside from taxes, because of the nature of processing fees, I assume it's somewhat common knowledge but there's always a chunk of patronage that goes back to the site, which is primarily the way that Patreon itself keeps running besides the rare fundraising it does on its own to shore up some additional security. Although it's added merchandising and the different tiers for creators to give itself more room to breathe in the last year or so.

This is also a point of mentioning that this isn't just Patreon, this is fairly similar across any kind of payment system online and such. I beliiiieve the standard processing fee across the board tends to be around 2%, but in Paypal/Patreon's case, the main reason why it hits harder earlier is because there's a flat portion alongside the percentage.

If anyone was around during the big kerfuffle over Patron fees a couple years ago, that flat element was the biggest contributor but overall in all circumstances a larger one-shot fee is more valuable than the equivalent amount of smaller ones.