On Patreon's recent fee changes (Patreon)

So the other day I receive an email from Patreon explaining that they would be tweaking the way their fees work. I'm not sure if they explain this on the email they've sent you but basically from everything that you guys pledge, 5% goes to Patreon, while a nebulous 7% to 15% went to processing fees for the transactions.

So when they announced that from now on they'd standardize the fees I thought it would be a great thing! I even discussed it over on discord telling everyone about the change.

In my mind people would still retain their pledge amounts, but now a standard fee of 0.29% (+ $0.35) would be charged from each pledge before it was sent over to be split 5%/95% between Patreon and me.

Boy was I wrong.

The actual way the new fees are gonna happen is actually the opposite. If you want to pledge $X to me, it means that you actually end up having to pay $X plus 2,9% of X, plus $0.35

 So a $15 pledge would actually be $15.78, a $10 pledge would be $10.64 and a $1 pledge would be $1.38

That's gonna be a big hit, specially on creators that depend on several small pledges. With the new system, the smaller your pledge is the more taxes you pay (because of that mandatory $0.35 on every transaction). Pledges $3 and below are heavily affected by this due to how the fees scale.

This will probably be a really big discussion point in the near future as it affects the current system so much (and because of how sudden everything was as well)

I totally understand that this big change may lead to people cancelling their pledges.

Rough times may be coming for creators over here, we'll have to wait and see how this whole thing evolves.

Edit:

And of course there's more and more that I keep forgetting to mention.

Like before every single patron was charged a single time at the 1st of each month, but with the new changes they're proposing you'll be charged at the anniversary of your pledge.

So if you subscribed to a creator on the 3rd, another one on the 12th and a third one of the 25th, you'll be paying 3 separate times each month (each of them with their own individual fees as well)

The more I read about this, the more insane it is

I do recommend you to make some noise so we can push this ridiculous change back. Tweet to the guys at Patreon, send email, contact other creators and patrons to do the same

I'm not asking it because I want to protect myself, we need to do this otherwise several creators won't be around in a couple of months