I’m sure there are a lot of factors to this change, but I think this is really bad for patrons and creators with many $1 pledges. I know there are large credit card fees for small transactions, but one of the bonuses of Patreon is that if I pledge $1 each to 20 creators is that one single $20 charge (after the first possible up-front charge) which would be subject to credit card transactions of something similar to 2.9% + $0.35
Example of current credit card fees:
With this new fee structure, as currently explained:
$1 * 0.029 + 0.35 = 0.38 * 20 = $7.60! new transaction(?) fees (paid for by the patron)
Now, I would think it would be ok and even beneficial to the whole system if patrons were charged the credit card fee every time their card was charged, but to have each pledge individually charged the credit card fee seems crazy and removes one of the benefits of creators being on Patreon and for patrons to pledge to multiple creators.
Is my analysis accurate? Am I missing something? What do you all think?
Unfortunately the blog post and FAQ do not clarify the pressing question… whether the system of charging bulk pledges to minimize the $0.35 on $1 pledges is being nixed or not. From the blog post and the FAQ, it seems like this has been nixed, but that could just be vague / misunderstood wording.
Just to add to what @graphtreon said, if we understadn this correctly, this means that if I support 100 campaigns at $1, under this new systems, I, as a patron will have to now pay ~$137.9.
I don’t mind paying more to support campaigns I like, HOWEVER I only have $100 a month I can reasonably spend on campaigns… and this new system means that I’d have to drop my support of ~27 campaigns. I haven’t worked out the math, but that seems like it would negate any benefit from 95%, and be much harder on smaller campaigns.
Great questions, and those are very valid concerns! Thank you for asking the hard questions and keeping us accountable.
I too share the values implicit in @graphtreon and @LordHarvie’s concerns. Here’s what’s new:
Yesterday at ~4PM PT the product manager for our payments team has updated the blog post with the guts and math of the decision:https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee-structure/ (scroll down to the section titled Update: 3:57pm PST)
I hope what she wrote helps clarify things around this big change.
This is just explaining the problems we had already figured out for ourselves. The issue is that this is going to lead to creators earning less because they will lose their smaller patrons. I never asked for new Patrons to be immediately charged, I was happy waiting until the end of the month when they were all done in bulk. It’s much better to batch transactions and only charge one transaction fee. I think if you explain the consequences of immediate charges to the people who asked for it they’d change their tune in a heartbeat, but instead you went forward with it, consequences be damned.
