There's only one tier now?

Something happened the other day that made me realize I had to write this post and explain some things. (Important, please read) I had a long time supporter contact me and being furious about my Patreon… and I didn't understand why at first. In the end we were able to sort it all out but I finally understood a big problem with how Patreon presents tiers. So here's the story... 

When I started here on Patreon I had more tiers than just the one I have now. My setup was a little different. Basically you would get everything I created in the time (and tier) you supported me. I thought this concept was simple and fair.

In time I found that supporters esp. new ones joining in late, were confused and even frustrated with this way of handling things. One challenge was that when you joined at the end of a multi-month project, you would only get what I created at the end, resulting in half or less-than-half of a set. This problem was on me as I didn't think this through properly. I was offering workarounds to fix this but it was time consuming and not very satisfying.

Another challenge was expectations. Other creators here offer you everything they have published even when you come in ten years later and only have showed support for a month. As much as I would love to be able to I am not financially in a position to do this now with large effort sets. I will rethink this once I get to a higher support volume but for now I have to make sure I am able to pay my bills.

So to make it more clear and easier to support I changed my tier format, deactivating the original tier structure and just using the one $1 tier I have now. I also stopped giving my larger creations away right here on Patreon and just offering the small chunk “basic bits” – both in a free version and the payed for advanced version – and you get them all even if you just join for a month. When I create larger sets Patreons receive a discount offer limited to the period it was released in.

When I made the change, technically the old tiers have been “unpublished” or deactivated but not removed/deleted. On my screen I didn't see the old tiers anymore. Through the talk with the long time supporter however I realized that old Patrons would still see these old tiers. Although I have written about adjusting your pledge to the new $1 tier multiple times during the change, not everyone actually adjusted. I thought they are being generous and maybe some where but others just didn't really notice the change by the way Patreon was presenting the changed tier structure kind of “unchanged” (and maybe did not read all my posts, which will lead to another discussion later this month) and left frustrated.

The reason why I only unpublished the old tiers was simply that I didn't find a way to delete the old tiers. The delete-icon was greyed out, which in my 35years of working with graphical  user interfaces means that a function is not usable. With this new realization I went back into the setup and tried to figure out (and with the power of the internet managed to find) how to actually delete the old tiers. The solution was that the greyed out icon could be actually be used!

So I am hoping that now everyone will see there is only one $1 tier and hopefully adjust their pledge level to what they really want (and more hopefully be content with what I create to not leave :-)  )

If you have been following the support volume for a while wondering when we will reach the first goal, you might have noticed that there has been a big fluctuation where all the new $1 supporters coming in are having a hard to time to offset the single $4 tier supporters leaving.

I think this new $1 tier setup has been working well the last year and I am very happy with all the new supporters who have found their way here and show their love. I have a long list of basic bits so there is much work to be done the next year(s) and I think you will be very happy with the rewards coming up.

I will go back to working on the final build of the hearse wagon now. So until next time, have fun and keep building! And a big heartfelt thank you to everyone who is supporting me!!!

Chris