The merchant banks do charge a per-transaction fee, but (AFAIK) all of the subscription payments happen at the same time each month. what LMN8R is suggesting is that all of the payments get bundled as one credit card transaction (which if that’s not how it works, Patreon is leaving a lot of money on the table, so it probably does) and the processing fees should be split instead of double- or triple- or whatever-charged depending on how many Patreons you subscribe to.
That said, it’d be annoying accounting for them, and it might be weird for the creators to get different amounts of money from each person depending on how many other things they subscribe to.
edited to add: stusser edited his response maybe five times within the time it took me to type this, so maybe my response is no longer necessary.
My worry is that Patreon has always charged per-project fees as a way to maximize their profits even if they in turn only get charged once per month, and that they don’t want to reduce those profits, leading them to continue doing the same thing now.
If credit card processors are just getting their usual 2.9% + 30 cents on the monthly lumped charges, but Patreon is misrepresenting that as a fee on each individual project someone backs, that seems like a misrepresentation credit card processors wouldn’t be very happy with.
Well they didn’t come right out and say they were simply passing fees along, did they? Perhaps they’re relying on that ambiguity to balloon their profits.
Why not do something like Gamers with Jobs does and have a pledge drive once a year? I’d gladly change my pledges to a manual yearly equivalent of what I pay now (or even a bit more) via PayPal or something.
For what it’s worth, GWJ switched to the Patreon model last year and they’ve been much more successful at that. It’s just that once a year they encourage people to join Patreon - even if it’s just for a month - and reward people for that, instead of asking people to donate once per year.
I was aware, but this last time around they said they’d also accept one-off PayPal donations. I’m just trying to think of what would involve the minimum transaction costs.
And it happened - here is a part of the email I just got
Starting December 18th, we will apply a new service fee of 2.9% + $0.35 that patrons will pay for each individual pledge. This service fee helps keep Patreon up and running.
@tomchick Please - if at all possible, find some other avenue of monthly payment we can use that works.
Yeah, I got the same email. As for me, I don’t really care what method is used for giving money to sites I support. I like that Patreon is kind of hands-free and just charges my amount on the first of the month. But if Tom prefers another method, I’d be ok with changing.
There is a Paypal link on the frontpage, if you prefer that. Still has a 2.9% + 30 cent transaction fee, but no 5% cut. You can do a monthly subscription there too.
@Papageno: Yes that’s right. But previously Tom basically ate those costs.
