That’s neat, except when I was in Poland, ten złoty wouldn’t even buy you a replacement button for your shirt.
Edit: Oh sorry, I misread. Ten Euros to złoty.
I would be happy to transfer 0.000571 bitcoins to Tom each month.
Well I only support two Patreons, so I’ll keep supporting Tom this way as long as he supports it, but it’s certainly going to discourage me from considering more in the future. It’s bonkers that they’re adding the fee for each pledge when it’s a single transaction on the banking side.
They’ve posted an update stating that the reason they’re doing this is a switch to separate CC charges for each pledge, rather than having them all grouped together. And why are they doing that? So that they can bill immediately, rather than only at the start of the next month, which apparently is important for the “Patreon as a paywall” use cases.
So turns out they’re not actually greedy assholes. Instead they’re total morons who didn’t understand where the value proposition of the service was. Unfortunately the outcome is still the same; I canceled half my pledges.
That makes more sense, but I think it’s still the wrong move. I see drawbacks to every situation. The Patreon as a paywall thing is problematic when people aren’t billed immediately. If they compromised and grouped all recurring subscriptions monthly into a single transaction and just billed separately for the first time you subscribed, you’d either be again short-changing the paywall model with a pro-rated first month, or overcharging the customer in other situations with a full price in the middle of the month. I’m sympathetic that there are no great answers here.
But I think what they’re doing now is the worst option.
So they are trying to appeal to all that underground porn scene bizness they were hosting and was discussed regularly in the news as being the majority of their revenues, while killing the venues for which they are recognized by the standard customer, is that right?
They should have rebranded to Pornatron when they spent that money a few months back, would have made more sense.
The sensible compromise would be a full first payment, but then prorate the first monthly payment.
Yes, it’s a magnificent fuckup. I would love to be a fly on the wall in the crisis meeting they must be having right now.
Absolute BOATLOADS of people will start cancelling their pledges through them and go to other services, or, who knows, mail a check for a longer time period if need be.
I only use it for this site and the Nintendo Force magazine ($5 bi monthly for a physical magazine shipped to my door) so I’ll hang on, but Nintendo Force is looking at other options and talking to Patreon. They have a significant subscriber list there so maybe they have enough pull to make them reconsider, but I doubt it.
I got out. We’ll have to come up with an alternative for @tomchick. My bank is hooked into the Zelle service, which is free on both ends – I’d be happy to do that. If we need to work around transaction fees, I’d prefer to go to an annual support plan.
That’s weird… I seem to have lost my little Q on my avatar? What happened?
You don’t have a Patron! title, either.
Looks like all the Patreon stuff is pulled. No logo at the top. The other thread here has more info on why Patreon is trying to change this…
All (OK, both) my Patreons are at the $10 level, so it’s not really an issue for me. And Paypal has a minimum fee for card transactions too, so I don’t see that switching to them works if you’re going to keep pitching in dollar level amounts on a monthly basis.
Lots of folks complaining about how their “lowest possible payment to be a Patron!” is going to cost them forty extra cents a month. Man, the state of the economy is rough!
(I keed I keed)
I know you’re kidding, but it’s because they put out $1 to multiple people that it becomes a funds problem.
It’s a 35% increase on $1 individual payments, which is huge.
If Patreon needs to switch to immediate billing, they should make the creators eat all costs and fees. As a patron if I pledge $1 I expect to be billed exactly $1-- the only fee I’ll accept is from the government in the form of taxes. And I’m not overjoyed about them either.
You’re paying the fee either way, it’s just your effective pledge is lower in the first instance.
How will this work for multiple payments to a patreon in a month. I support TekThing and Daily Tech Show and the pledge is $1 per episode. So whenever they post one, it puts that $1 as one of the amounts to pay in the month. If they do 5 shows, then the end month will be $5.50 but if they do it everytime, my bill just for that one pledge is now $6.90 (1.38 * 5).
Yes, that’s right. My guess is anyone billing more than once per month will change their cycles to be monthly to avoid pissing off their community.