Plans regarding lowest membership tiers (Follower/Supporter) (Patreon)

(These changes don't affect tiers at $5 and higher, but I wanted to post this to all tiers, just to keep you guys informed of changes in membership options.)

Just a little heads up that I'm planning on doing some changes to the lowest membership tiers sometime during this month. Simply put, instead of the $1 Follower tier and $3 Supporter tier, there will be a single $2 tier, most likely the Supporter tier will see a price drop to $2, to keep things simple. The $2 tier will also get an extra benefit in form of a monthly colored exclusive. Lately I've been doing a lot more colored exclusives (for tiers $5+) than usual, so giving the $2 tier access to one of those each month seems like a reasonable way to increase the appeal of the new lowest tier.

What does this mean to current Supporter ($3) members?

• The price of your membership tier goes down from $3 to $2 (or the equivalent of the currency you pay in).
• You will now get a monthly colored exclusive, previously for the $5+ tiers only. (These will likely be only one-shot images, or parts of very short series, not comics or the like.) 
• The exclusive doodles, previews, etc will no longer be a guaranteed benefit. (Though this has pretty much been a thing a couple times already. Some months I do lot of these, other months I focus on colored stuff only.)
• Required actions: Once the price has dropped (or a new $2 tier has been added, not sure yet about the logistics), you will need to adjust your pledge to the new amount/tier. I will inform you when this is required. 

What does this mean to current Follower ($1) members?

• The Follower tier will be disabled, meaning that new members can't subscribe to it anymore.
• Your membership will remain active for a while. Required actions: Eventually, maybe in a few months, I would like to bring the tier down entirely, so by then you'll need to choose between upgrading to the $2 tier, or dropping your membership. I will be sending reminders about this.
• While the Follower tier is still active, you will keep receiving any exclusives your tier is eligible for, but I will be reducing the frequency of content delivery to one-time only. Whether that's at time of publication or as an end-of-month archive, I haven't decided yet.

What does this mean to supporters of the same tiers on SubscribeStar?

• I will be doing the same changes there as well, though the process may be slightly different. I will inform SubscribeStar supporters about this as well at some point.

Why am I planning these changes?

For several reasons. 

First, I'd like to reduce the number of the main tiers from 4 to 3. The list of tiers on Patreon only shows the first three by default and hides the others until you press a not-so-obvious 'show more' button. I want all the regular tiers to show immediately. Having less tiers also means less end-of-month archives, less tier-specific versions of content delivery, etc. Every minute spent on this stuff could be spent on doing art, or R&R.

Secondly, the $1 tier doesn't really get any meaningful content or benefits currently. It's a nice tip jar sort of thing, but after all the fixed fees and taxes these don't really add up to much in money for me. Although I value every bit of monetary support thrown at me, this tier is just not efficient, and I sort of feel bad for people putting so much money into processing fees in hopes of supporting me, while I end up receiving very little of their money. Plus it'd be nice if the lowest tier was a tier people wanted to subscribe to because of content, not because it's the only way to 'tip' me. (And just to remind everyone, I can't accept donations or tips. Local laws don't consider it an acceptable source of income.)

Likewise, the $3 tier hasn't been getting much content either (aside from June's big batch of previews), so  boosting that tier seemed like a good direction to go. Cheaper and a bit more content.

Eventually I will likely look into doing similar changes to the $5 and $10 tiers (prices and benefits mainly), but not before I do some research on possible impacts on revenue, so those of you in those tiers, expect polls about this in near future.

And finally, these are not guaranteed changes, YET! But unless something comes up, they'll happen, probably in a week or two. Now's a good time to give feedback on these plans. Please do let me know if you find issues with these changes or have suggestions regarding them. Feel free to comment here, or send me a message (there's a button to message me on my Patreon page if you're a member).