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Things to know before starting a Patreon page

pencerw.com

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Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#21

Post by sitkack »

zzzeek wrote: post #14

Patreon does not seem very spectacular but I don't exactly see what the reason not to have a patreon page is. I have one and it is one of several different income sources for my open source work. it's 100 bucks a month I wouldn't have otherwise.

Patreon is run by clowns. They closed my account for "fraud". My credit card, my name, my billing address, trying to give money to patreons, tech support is useless. The fact that they can't run a viable business AND they do stuff like this, I'd personally like to see them slowly go out of business so it would give time for their users to find another platform.

Please, everyone, stop using this horribly run service.

Use github, paypal, gumroad, something, anything, but not Patreon.

Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#22

Post by pencerw »

redis_mlc wrote: post #8
pencerw wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

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 advanc…

to each their own! And of course you're welcome to learn all about what I used Patreon for - I linked to my business's website in the first sentence of the blog post.

Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#23

Post by pencerw »

zzzeek wrote: post #14

Patreon does not seem very spectacular but I don't exactly see what the reason not to have a patreon page is. I have one and it is one of several different income sources for my open source work. it's 100 bucks a month I wouldn't have otherwise.

(Author of the post here)

I actually kind of agree with this: Patreon is indeed a good way to earn enough money to buy dinner once a week or whatever. I guess it's also good for big time influencer types who are in growth mode and not worrying about their overhead. I just think it's a mediocre solution if what you want is to create a stable, predictable, and mature small business out of your work.

I totally appreciated Patreon when I was starting out; it just really sucked to scale on, and switching to a more legit system was somewhat painful.

Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#24

Post by mirimir »

quadrangle wrote: post #12
ehutch79 wrote: post #3

I'd love to know what the other options are out there, as mentioned in the article. Right now, patreon is well known, and I'd be concerned with an unknown site turning supporters off.

Here's a thorough summary: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfundi... (at the wiki of still-not-launched different type of patronage platform that is sharing its own research)

Looking through that, I see some Bitcoin-driven services. What I don't see are any that accept payments and pay out via a wide range of channels, from PayPal to Bitcoin. And for Bitcoin, I don't mean Coinbase or exchange accounts that enforce KYC rules. Stripe used to work with Bitcoin, but no longer.

Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#25

Post by egypturnash »

Works fine for me, when I'm not struggling to make progress on my work due to waves vaguely at 2020, Patreon lets me pay my rent by drawing comics about robot ladies with reality problems and cartoon animal space operas.

YMMV obviously. I don't use any of its integrations, I just go to the web UI and upload a new page and type some stuff about it now and then, and also hit up my gloriously-unfashionable Wordpress-based site and add the same file to the secret-patrons-only whole-chapter-WIP page. Which does not bother doing any authentication because it's all ultimately gonna be free on the public pages of my site anyway.

I might get a bigger percentage if I fucked around with some other way to create recurring payments, sure. But my experience is that people now know what is up with Patreon, and are much more likely to say "okay sure I'm in, I'll give you a few bucks per page of your weird-ass comics for a while" than to sign up for anything else I've ever done. Like I think I got all of fifty bucks, once, out of the Paypal donation button I used to have on my old comics. I've gotten several years of paying my rent out of Patreon and that lower signup friction is well worth their cut IMHO.

(I will note that I do kinda feel like Patreon's sort of abandoned the per-creation model, it's not uncommon to see them roll out new features that only work on the monthly model. Which really doesn't work for someone like me who can go silent for months at a time due to depression.)

Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#26

Post by toomuchtodo »

sitkack wrote: post #21
zzzeek wrote: post #14

Patreon does not seem very spectacular but I don't exactly see what the reason not to have a patreon page is. I have one and it is one of several different income sources for my open source work. it's 100 bucks a month I wouldn't have otherwise.

Patreon is run by clowns. They closed my account for "fraud". My credit card, my name, my billing address, trying to give money to patreons, tech support is useless. The fact that they can't run a viable business AND they do stuff like this, I'd personally like to see them slowly go out of business so it would give time for their users to find another platform. Please, everyone, stop using this horribly run service.…

Funny enough, I asked someone I patron if I could just Zelle them the money every month instead and they sent me their info. Takes me about 2 mins a month, and I’ve cut Patreon out of the transaction, so win win.

Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#27

Post by voiper1 »

ehutch79 wrote: post #3

I'd love to know what the other options are out there, as mentioned in the article. Right now, patreon is well known, and I'd be concerned with an unknown site turning supporters off.

I'm not totally sure what the UX is for a non programmer, but stripe is an option. They just released a customer billing portal for users to self-manage their plan on recurring billing. Sounds like it could hit many of the features.

Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#29

Post by sillysaurusx »

pencerw wrote: post #23
zzzeek wrote: post #14

Patreon does not seem very spectacular but I don't exactly see what the reason not to have a patreon page is. I have one and it is one of several different income sources for my open source work. it's 100 bucks a month I wouldn't have otherwise.

(Author of the post here) I actually kind of agree with this: Patreon is indeed a good way to earn enough money to buy dinner once a week or whatever. I guess it's also good for big time influencer types who are in growth mode and not worrying about their overhead. I just think it's a mediocre solution if what you want is to create a stable, predictable, and mature small business out of your work. I totally appreciat…

Which system did you switch to?

Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#30

Post by wishiwasoutside »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #29
pencerw wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Author of the post here) I actually kind of agree with this: Patreon is indeed a good way to earn enough money to buy dinner once a week or whatever. I guess it's also good for big time influencer types who are in growth mode and not worrying about their overhead. I just think it's a mediocre solution if what you want is to create a stable, predictable, and mature small business out of your work. I totally appreciat…

Which system did you switch to?

This is covered in the OP.
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