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How many engineers does Patreon have?
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/21/patreon-cpo-interview-doub...
Apple take 30%. You have to understand that you're not paying just for the service, but the reach. You can DIY your donation platform and the tech side isn't rocket science, the issue that platforms like Patreon and Apple have access to orders of magnitude more users than you can ever generate on your own.
's/the reach/the big-name familiarity/'
's/more users/more legitimacy & perceived security for most potential donors/'
These articles seem to pop up from time to time, and the persons numbers seem roughly accurate in my experience. In my experience Patreon has been around 11% cut scenario, split very roughly between Payment Fees and Platform fees. But I am on the Founders plan, which is the same 5% platform fees as Patreon Lite, but with the extra features of the 8% Pro plans. I do think it is probably best for creators to diversify…
I think it does have the potential to be like Kickstarter and really broaden the appeal of this type of contribution, but from what I can see, it hasn't actually managed to do that part yet -- both based on articles like this one and my own anecdotal experience.
Apple take 30%. You have to understand that you're not paying just for the service, but the reach. You can DIY your donation platform and the tech side isn't rocket science, the issue that platforms like Patreon and Apple have access to orders of magnitude more users than you can ever generate on your own.
On the other hand, switching away from YouTube would be instant channel suicide, because they are actually the ones providing the reach. I think YouTube must see the existence of Patreon as a critical failure. YouTube is doing all the hard work and Patreon is getting paid for it!
They're definitely overcharging for more profit, but your margins won't be much lower if you handle payment yourself. Your 3% bank cut to receive money doesn't always work because often there's a minimum fee per transaction.
I know most iDeal (Dutch payment provider) transaction costs are 25 cents. It's a flat fee, so buying a €2000 TV will still leave you with 25 cents of fees, which is great for big stores, but when you use them do donate a single euro, the transaction fees are a whole quarter of the donation.
Tons of tiny transactions is a pretty terrible way to receive money. It's not "give up >15%" terrible, especially if your patrons tend to donate more, but Patreon needs to spread costs over all creators to make small content creators worth the effort.
Having a look at Donorbox, the same issue becomes clear: the cost for receiving payment in .NL is only 1.4%… and a €0,25 payment processor fee. These low processing fees are also only applicable to registered non profits in the NL which the author most definitely isn't. Even with the extra cheap rates and a non profit the fees to the lowest tier (±€3) add up to nearly 10% on a platform that's built around minimising costs for non profit organisations. There is the ability to use bank transfers for real cheap, but that's always a possibility anyway. One thing this site does seem to offer is the ability to offload all the site's cost onto the person who donates rather than subtract it afterwards, but that's just raising the donation price to compensate, not really a decrease in cost.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Banks take care of an enormous amount of small transactions on credit and debit cards and only charge ~3%, some European countries have fees as low as 0.3%. The high fees of patreon have nothing to do with payment support issues.
At least in the US, banks provide quite a bit less payment support. Chargebacks are a big one: with Stripe or something similar, you have to manually respond and pay a $20+ fee every time someone files a chargeback.
The thing about Patreon is that it sucks for users too (as in, the consumers). Both the website and the app really suck. They look horrible, have few features, and often work poorly. It essentially serves as a notification platform that I then try to bounce out of into YouTube or wherever as soon as possible. It's kind of mind boggling that they seem to leave so much engagement on the table when even a mediocre websi…
TFW when white collar professionals complain about the prices businesses charge in order to pay the white collar salaries necessary to make the products they use. And so many of these companies aren't even profitable, either. It's like carnivores being judgmental of hunters.
> And so many of these companies aren't even profitable, either.
It's not profitable because it's an engineering playground - the objective is not to solve the business problem described above, it's to build complexity for the sake of complexity to justify future funding rounds.
If they wanted to, they could literally consider the project done and run it with a skeleton crew handling support & maintenance, but why intentionally put yourself out of a job?