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Seriously Patreon?

Seriously Patreon?

Not only you raise the pricing of your service for the bulk of your customers (and I mean creators of course) but you want to make it pass like an improvement?

Your “95%” campaign is just insulting.

Seriously Patreon?

Not only you raise the pricing of your service for the bulk of your customers (and I mean creators of course) but you want to make it pass like an improvement?

Your “95%” campaign is just insulting.

I’m a creator. My “job” is to convince other people, supporters/patrons, to give you money, so you can give them to me. Of course I’m more than willing to share the cake with you, since you provide me all the tools I need to do my job.

Let’s delve into my particular case a little. I’m a writer. I write speculative fiction, mostly short stories. It’s a format that has a very niche market, so I basically have zero chance of making a living out of it “in the real world”.

This is why, six months ago, I decided to move all my content over to Patreon. To me it was a little more than a blogging platform, but it had the built-in function of recurring donations. This meant that I could drive people interested in my work here, and if they liked it enough they had an easy-to-push button that would send me some money.

That was perfect for a writer specialized in fantasy short stories, as micro-funding was the only reasonable solution I found for making some money out of my passion. I even managed to grab a couple of supporter in this six months, and to be honest I didn’t expect to make money out of this project so quickly.

And then, December came, and with it the “fee changes”. Oh boys and girls, and what changes!

*inhales*

Dear Patreon, I’m the one putting my face out there to convince people to give you money. Now you are using my face to take more money from them. You are taking more money from supporters to fund your operation, using my face as a shield, and blaming it on me.

You say you are giving creators more money, “95% of every pledge”, but this is a lie. I have a supporter who gives me 1$ a month. Next month you’ll charge them 1,38$ and give me 0.95$. So you will give me 68.85% of the money you took them.

This supporter happens to be a fellow creator. So I used to get 0.95$ already, out of the 1$ they paid. From next month you’ll be charging them 40% more, while I get the same money, because you removed the option for creators to support other creators directly through Patreon’s funds.

I also have another supporter, who is not a fellow creator, and pledges 5$ every month. You used to charge them 5$ and I would get 4.37$, which is 87.4%. With the new system you’re going to charge them 5.5$ (5+0.35+3% fee) and I will get 4.75$ which is 86.36% of the five dollar and fifty cents you just charged them.

Let me spell it in all caps: I’M GETTING A SMALLER CUT OF THE CAKE.

I don’t know where those money go. Maybe you got tricked by the forest sorcerer into accepting an awful deal with a bank or credit card company, or you have to face some gluttonous investors. Honestly, I don’t care...

... but ...

YOU ARE USING MY FACE AND MY WORK TO TAKE IN MORE MONEY WHILE GIVING ME A SMALLER CUT.

And let me state explicitly one thing: you have the right to make money out of your service. And you have the right to make more money than you made yesterday. You have the right to up your fees and your share of the cake...

... but...

You don’t have the right to sell it, with a straight face and cry-me-a-river blog posts, as a benefit to creators, when me and many others live of small recurring donations under 5$ and will make less money tomorrow. Cause people will adjust their pledges to your new fees, eventually.

You don’t have the right to up the money you take from the supporters I convinced to come to your service, hiding it behind a lie and a complex system of asyncronous micro-transactions.

You want to up your fees? Fine. Let me know it will happen, I’ll talk to my supporters and say something like “Hey, if you pledge me 1$ I only get 65% of it, so if you can maybe up your pledge to 1,5$ so I get the same amount as before, and eventually a decent revenue.”I’m one of the many faces of your company. I’m the one selling your service to the ones who put money into it.

You don’t have the right to bypass me upping prices and then say it was all to get me a raise. Raise I won’t get, because 

*deep breath*

I’M GETTING A SMALLER CUT OF THE CAKE.

*exhales*

*inhales*

*exhales*

These are the reason behind my decision to move to another platform.I haven’t decided which one yet because, I have to be honest, up to three days ago Patreon was so good at what I needed that you literally had no competition.

But I won’t let you use my face anymore.

I invite my supporters to remove their pledges.

I’ll leave my content on Patreon for the time being, in hope that Patreon steps back, or just to have my work available to anyone interested until I find another solution.

Thanks to my patrons for supporting me, I hope you’ll stay with me in the future.

To Patreon, thanks for nothing.
 

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