New Patreon Fees & Alternatives

UPDATE: Due to mass rebel, Patreon has scrapped the new fee system and will stick with the old one.

Original post below.

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Patreon recently announced a major change to their fee structure, and will start charging you more than what you pledged to pay.

Before this change, the Patreon fee and transaction processing fees (from PayPal and credit card companies) were deducted from your pledge before it was sent to me. This meant if you pledged $1, you would be charged $1 and I would receive about $0.85.

The new fee structure adds a flat fee on top of your pledge ($0.35) as well as charging you the transaction fee (2.9%). This means if you pledge $1, you will be charged $1.38, and I will receive $0.95.

Here's a chart that visualizes the change nicely:

(full resolution, source)

With pledges greater than $1 the difference is less dramatic, but still I do not like this idea of charging you for the privilege of supporting me, and I especially do not like that none of this is mentioned when signing up to make the pledge: you would only find out about it at the end of the month when you are charged more than you expect.

Already a number of patrons have cancelled their pledges due to this change. I completely understand and am considering the same action for the creators that I personally support.

Solution? Alternative?

Currently there is no exact alternative to Patreon, so I have no immediate plans to jump ship.

For the time being, I have joined Liberapay, which works similarly to Patreon but without any fees (other than for payment processing), and all donations are anonymous.

I'm not asking everyone to boycott Patreon. Only if this new fee system bothers you, consider switching to support me on Liberapay instead.

In terms of progress towards the Patreon goals, I will simply add the donations from Liberapay to the current amount on Patreon manually to determine if a goal has been met. I'll investigate if there is a more automatic way to show this sum on hdrihaven.com as well.

If anyone has any ideas for how to handle this in the coming months, if there is a good alternative, please let me know in the comments.  

If you'd prefer to make a once-off donation, there are now various options available too.

Thanks for your continued support and understanding :)

-Greg