Before, if I backed 10 projects at $1, I paid 1 transaction fee as they billed my CC once a month for $10. Now they take 10 transitions fees. Where does this money go? This is a backhanded move. All this is, is more money to Patreon and PayPal. This is not more money to creators. In the end, creators will get less money due to fewer people backing.
Over and over and over, creators has said they are happy to pay for the transaction fees, this is NOT something the creators wanted. This is something Patreon/PayPal wanted and they though they could just cram it down. Maybe they underestimated, maybe their greed will pay out. I hope everyone leaves Patreon. I wonât back anyone on Patreon anymore.
They stated that it goes to cover the third party transaction fees.
In other words, the quantity of money currently collected by that 2-10% of transaction fees paid by creators is now covered by that 2.9% + $0.35 per transaction paid by supporters.
You can either trust their claims or not. The point is that we have no way to know if the two methods of collecting money will actually produce the same amount of dollars or if Patreon is getting a margin from the new one.
Imagine a patreon where Ron Gilbert does chores around the house, but before doing an action, he shouts that action in the scumm language: âopen doorâ. âuse toilet paper on assâ. Iâd definitely buy that.
Yes, then it doesnât affect you at all. And even if you wouldnât want to pay the creator more due to the shifts in fees you could even reduce your pledge amount accordingly (unless you need to stay on your pledge tier).
I prefer it the other way around because I believe in the masses, i.e. when enough people pledge even a small amount to creators they could live from it and keep creating content like (free) webcomics. Of course my single donation to a creator doesnât change much, it only works when there are many. And especially those cases are hurt badly with that change.
You just need one person backing more than one creator. I know at least two people who do this.
Do you really need a calculation for this?
I actually do believe them that it roughly covers third party transaction fees.
It just doesnât help that they are introducing this large number of additional transactions Iâm not willing to pay.
Claims like
In preparation for this change, we ran experiments and months and months of research to understand patronsâ potential reactions and we found that many patrons were happy knowing that this change will send more money to creators.
or
As it turns out, patrons werenât nearly as sensitive to the amount of the fee as we predicted
?
Well, we will see how it will work out. Iâm leaving Patreon.
Unless I have misunderstood how the new method will work, it will affect everybody including me, but I will be affected in an extremely small way.
Yes. Specifically, I donât understand how itâs possible to conclude that creators would get more money without knowing how much creators currently pay for transaction fees. Does Patreon disclose this information other than â2-10% of the pledgeâ?
Yes, thatâs understandable and the main controversy of the new system: money is now collected (also) thanks to those multiple $0.35 cents.
Just shifting a fee (or a tax) from creators to supporters should not make any difference. The price will adjust and no group will be better off or worse off. (Itâs like tax incidence: it does not matter if the tax is paid by employers or employees, by landlords or tenants, etc. ) AFAIR.
The point is that some people claim that Patreon is not just shifting a tax but they are now collecting more than the necessary amount of money in the process.
PayPal currently gets one transaction fee per month from my Patreon payments.
Thatâs a percentage + a fixed value per transaction, for example $0.30.
With the new system when Iâm supporting 10 creators PayPal will now get e.g. $3.00 instead of $0.30.
Define âno group will be better off or worse offâ.
Those were quotes from Patreonâs blog post and Iâm not sure if I trust those specific ones.
But we will see how the masses of supporters will react.
I was referring to the multiple-transaction-free problem.
With one creator you only have one monthly payment (assuming monthly) and only one single transactions, itâs the same like before.
They will now collect more money from you but the transactions fees were paid by you before as they are paid now, with the difference that now they are predictable.
Thatâs your choice: Unless you stay above $1 you can choose any amount you like! You can pay even more. Or you can pay less for example resulting in the same payment as with the old system and also resulting in approximately the same amount for the creator as before (Those 5% for Patreon will be less in this case).
That is unless you have multiple creators to support. Creators would lose money in this case when you reduce your overall payment to the old amount.
You are saying that Patreon will get the same amount of money, both in percentage (5%) and in absolute. But there will be fewer supporters. But I donât get why you think there should be fewer supporters. Presumably the price will adjust (i.e. creators will ask for less than before), so I donât quite see why the number of supporters should decrease. (ConfusingâŚ)
Thatâs not entirely correct, this only applies to those 5%.
Since they also get the service fee which is meant to be used to pay transaction fees of payment providers there is room that they will end up with a bit more or possible even a bit less money.
Patreon loses supporters because now they make them pay a transaction fee PER creator. The single-monthly-payment thing was their killer feature in the past. Now itâs gone (/will be gone).
The one winning here is the payment provider, the ones losing are the patrons supporting multiple creators, having to pay multiple transactions per month (per creator or per post).
Sorry, I wasnât clear. I meant that if I do nothing, I will be automatically charged more after the 18th of December. So things will change for me as well, albeit not very much.