Various issues with the API/Integration unlock flow were fixed

The unlock flow that takes your patrons from your site/app to the Patreon pledge flow to unlock your remote content or app features had various problems.

First, the pledge matching was shaky - if it was not able to find an exact match, the flow tried to match the $ amount that you locked your remote content for to the lowest $ amount tier it could find in your tiers. If successful, this caused unlock loops in which the patron kept getting matched to a lower tier than what was needed to unlock your remote content or feature.

This was recently fixed. Now the flow should match the $ amount to the exactly equal or nearest higher tier to get the patron to pledge the needed amount for unlocking remote content. Your patrons should not experience any infinite unlock loops caused by this anymore.

Another issue was that if your patron was not logged into Patreon or if he or she was a user who did not have a Patreon account, the flow got broken when the patron logged in or registered due to the patron being sent to your creator page instead of being redirected to your remote content or app.

The recent fix also addresses this - now even if the patron has to log in or register, the flow should pick up again and the patron should eventually get redirected to your remote app/content.

Note that there are a few exceptions to this: If the patron already has a pledge and has to edit that pledge, he or she will still end up in your Patreon page instead of your remote content or app since the new checkout flow that fixes this is yet to support pledge editing. Also, if the patron has a legacy credit card that required processing with Stripe, the same will happen. Outside these exceptions, the redirection should work normally for almost all cases.

This affected all apps, integrations and custom code that used the /become-patron unified pledge/unlock flow. The fix should take effect without you having to do anything on your side.

1 Like