I’m sorry, I couldn’t quite figure something very basic out:
I don’t understand the link between a single reward purchase and private posts.
How does it apply to me if I want to integrate my website with Patreon - let’s say I’m offering a badge in return. The terms don’t make sense. And if a user pledged for a reward, do I have to create some kind of a fake patron-only post to claim it?
Then if I already have 2 patron-only posts and a new user makes a pledge is he already being charged for the existing two? Will he never?
I’ve been reading the docs and API but can’t figure out this seemingly simple concept.
I’ll try to make my question clearer, it is mostly about this sentence that a potential patron would see when they try to pledge to get rewarded:
“You are billed every month based on your pledge, monthly max, and the number of paid posts this creator makes.”
I don’t see how it makes any sense, and I doubt it would make sense to my patrons, if - for example the reward is other something tangible or lifetime-free-access to some web site.
Should I switch the system to a different mode somehow?
Patreon is “[…] a membership platform for creators”. Patreon does not support one time purchases. A user becomes a patron of a campaign and then they are billed based on their patronage, depending on the conditions of that campaign.
A user becomes a patron with a pledge and then Patreon charges them every month based on their pledge. A patron’s pledge is either per creation or per month. A per month pledge is charged at the fixed amount, whereas a per creation pledge is charged based on the number of creations that month, multiplied by the pledge amount (up to the maximum).
e.g: If you are a patron of a per month campaign and your pledge is $5, then every month you will be charged $5. If you are a patron of a per creation campaign and your pledge is $5, then every month you will be charged $5 * (the number of creations that month) up to your chosen maximum amount.
Patron’s have access to all posts at their reward level regardless of payments that have been made, there isn’t a relationship between posts and charges, rather, if the patron’s chosen reward level is equal to (or greater than) the reward level required to access the post then they have access.
Are you looking to offer your users the ability to make a one-time payment to you in return for some sort of reward on your website, e.g: a custom badge? If you can talk more about what you’re trying to achieve other users of the Patreon API may be able to point you in the right direction.
I highly recommend taking some time browsing around the Patreon support website (here) because there’s a lot of information that is very helpful to people who want to understand the underlying system. I’ve learned a lot about their system based on the information I’ve found in the articles there.
Thank you so much for explaining this to me, yes… simply put, that’s what I’m trying to do:
Are you looking to offer your users the ability to make a one-time payment to you in return for some sort of reward on your website, e.g: a custom badge?
I found no concise way to do it in a way that would sit right with the Patreon concept, maybe Patreon isn’t the ideal solution for that, maybe I need to get a proper credit card gateway.
Stripe is the payment gateway used by Patreon, and Stripe is very easy to implement directly. If you’re looking to do a simple payment-for-badge system on your website, you could implement Stripe in less than an hour.
If Patreon can’t figure out how to make it easy for people to kick a five-spot or a ten-spot (with zero thought) once and with no future obligations, I think they need a new payment service provider.