Patreon Hits Donors With New Fees, Angering Creators (venturebeat.com)

Patreon's changing their fee structure to make donors cover payment-processing fees (standardized to 2.9%) -- plus an additional 35 cents for every pledge. Long-time Slashdot reader NewtonsLaw reports that Patreon's users are furious: Despite Patreon's hype that this is a good thing for creators, few of these actually seem to agree and there's already a growing backlash on social media... many fear that their net return will be lower because the extra fees levied on patreons are causing them to either reduce the amount they pledge or withdraw completely... For those patrons supporting only a few creators the effect won't be large, but for those who make small donations to many creators this could amount to a hike of almost 40% in the amount charged to their credit cards. Without exception, all the content creators I have spoken to would have:

a) liked to have been consulted first

b) wanted the option to retain the old system where they bear the cost of the fees.

As a content creator, I've already seen quite a few of my patreons reducing their pledge and others canceling their pledges completely -- and I understand why they are doing that.
"Everyone hates Patreon's new fee," writes VentureBeat, adding "Many creators are saying it's unfair for patrons to have to pay transaction fees. In addition to that, most people support multiple creators and not just one, and they'll have to pay the extra fee for each pledge they make."

Tech journalist Bryan Lunduke is already soliciting suggestions on Twitter for an open source or Free Software solution that accepts donations from multiple payment systems, and while the change doesn't go into effect until December 18th, NewtonsLaw writes that "it's starting to look as if many content creators will be getting a slightly larger percentage of a much smaller amount as a result of this lunacy by Patreon -- something that will see them far worse off than the were before."

Comments

That's not how it worked before

[Leuf]

If someone was supporting 10 patrons for $1/month each, then Patreon would bill them ONCE for $10 each month and the single transaction fee was split between the 10 creators. The result being each creator would get around 90 cents. This is what made the ecosystem of small donations actually work.

Now that person is billed 10 times with 10 transaction fees totaling $14 and each creator receives 95 cents.

Before the creators were getting 90% of the donation. Now they are getting 68%. People are upset because it breaks the system that only existed because of the way the fees were originally structured.

There's always Hatreon

[Anonymous Coward]

Give these guys a try.

Re:Hits small pledges the most

[Anonymous Coward]

$1.38 after this goes into effect. A 38% surcharge is just ludicrous.

Yep and if you were donating $1/mo to 20 artists it's now $27.60 once the fees are included.

I only support one and he's already emailed us all saying that it's absurd, he understands if people cancel their pledges (and many already have) and that he's looking for an alternative platform.

Re:Hits small pledges the most

[Anonymous Coward]

It's even worse than that:

Pledges aren't aggregated at the end of the month any longer, they'll be billed on the monthly anniversary of the pledge date.

For ALL pledges under roughly $10 (in countries WITHOUT VAT), the creator takes home a smaller percentage of the overall pledge + fees than they did before.

Credit-card companies will trigger on fraud for the same amount pulled multiple times in one day and lock the card, so you can't just re-pledge to sync everything on the 1st again like before. And even if you did you'd still pay the fee on each individual pledge.

For pay-per-post entries, that means every time that creator hits 'post' it'll charge everyone's card. How long until someone hits it half a dozen times by accident and their patrons all get their cards locked?

- WolfWings, still too lazy to login to /., but this is too damn important.