Things to know before starting a Patreon page

Regarding most of this: I think this is why they built (bought?) Memberful.

The article is complaining that Patreon is not a full banking app.

Well, duh.

Patrons and small-time creators are very happy with what it does, and don't care about what it doesn't do - Patreon pays the monthly rent of a lot of artists who have no other short-term options until their career is in full-swing. By contrast, Youtube is notorious for being unreliable as a revenue source.

My only complaints about Patreon are:

- the app is one of the slowest web apps today. Actually, I lied - it's the slowest. Shame on the programming team behind this. Get your shit together.

- they just started charging sales tax on donations if the creator offers rewards content (almost all do so.) That doesn't make sense for posting a video link a day early, foreign artists, etc.

- I think a VC bought Patreon. We know how that always ends.

My suggestions are:

- profile the app performance and fix it.

- maybe ask the article author what he's expecting for discoverability on a payment app. Perhaps adding a couple pieces of metadata alone might help?

Source: I used it daily as a Patron from July, 2019 through June, 2020 while providing feedback to a creator.

(Author of the blog post here)

Point taken, though I'm not sure that's exactly what I said. My complaint re: accounting is that Patreon integrates horribly with QBO. If they cared, they would have a webhook that rolled up all collected pledges, payment processing fees, sales taxes and platform fees into a single sales receipt so that QBO et al could ingest and record it as a sale (or a list of sales).

Also, the thing about "revenue" vs "earnings" on their creator side analytics is just straight up deceptive. They don't need to be accounting software, but that doesn't mean that they can throw around accounting terms however they want.

I don't know any artists who use QuickBooks, so I'm not sure where you're coming from. You're in some kind of parallel universe to the people happily using Patreon to collect from their followers.

And they don't care about "revenue" vs "earnings" since they went to Berklee College of Music, and just want to pay their rent this month.

To be constructive:

- explain your use case in your blog. Perhaps you have an advanced use case that would be a good roadmap for future features

- or go use Stripe or Paypal payments for payment processing. Patreon is community funding software.

Self-host ghost.org?