Touhou-Project.com

Change in patreon fees

Added 2017-12-08 18:51:01 +0000 UTC

UPDATE Dec 13: Patreon is no longer changing how they collect their fees for the time being.

Hey there! As you might have seen in recent emails from Patreon, they're changing the way fees are collected. If you haven't seen it yet, basically whenever your payments are processed going forward you'll be charged an additional 2.9% and $0.35 from whatever your pledge is. All other processing fees such as Paypal or from credit cards have been standardized into this rate as well, so there's nothing else you'll have to pay aside from VAT (if you're in the EU).

The stated goal of this is to make it so the creators get more money from each pledge. As it currently stands, I get an average of 90% (it's plus or minus a percent depending on the month) of all the money pledged because of the varying transactions fees from each pledge seems to vary between 5%-15% of the sum. This is taken out from the creator's side of things. Under the new system, 95% of the amount goes to me no matter what, meaning that I'd be getting more from each individual pledge.

I'm not sure how I feel about all this. On the one hand, it's definitely better for me as it makes things more predictable and means I get more money per pledge. On the other, it's kind of misleading for pledges to end up costing more than you might think when you become a patron. Hopefully it isn't too burdensome a change that it'll scare people away since in practice, for the highest tier, it only works out to $0.55 more per month per patron.

There's not much I can do about it except ask how you feel about it and if there's something you should think I should be doing different. As always I'm striving to be transparent about these things.