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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

#41

Post by bryanrasmussen »

fxtentacle wrote: post #11
redis_mlc wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I work with many freelance photographers who use QBO, so it is common in some industries. BTW, your example sounds a bit like those people have a complete disregard for tax law. That sounds like the end of the year is going to be very shocking when they figure out that the patreon money which they used for rent wasn't actually theirs to use.

it's been my experience that if you have to pay rent or keep the money for taxes you will pay rent and then later get punished for not paying the taxes, because if you don't pay the rent now later is going to suck anyway.

Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#42

Post by akling »

I'm currently using Patreon and GitHub Sponsors to accept donations. If you are doing anything software related, I would definitely encourage you to set up GitHub Sponsors right away.

GitHub Sponsors: - Zero fees (compared to the ~10% Patreon takes) (!) - They match all donations (up to a limit of $5000) for the first year (!!) - Great exposure. Tons of people have found me through GitHub. (I don't think anyone ever found me through Patreon.)

It's still worth it for me to use both services, as some people have strong feelings about one or the other. And in fact, I also have a PayPal for people who don't trust either one. :)

Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#45

Post by majewsky »

executesorder66 wrote: post #39
sillysaurusx wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which system did you switch to?

It's mentioned in the middle of the post: > I moved to a combination of Quickbooks Online ($645/year; note that Intuit is a terrible company) and Squarespace’s ($480/year) recurring products feature. But the squarespace's recurring products feature seems focused more toward physical products than digital creative artifacts which I mainly associate Patreon with.

It's always hilarious how broken the American banking system is that you need to pay over $1000/year worth of tooling to receive recurring payments from patrons.

In the EU, you would just open a deposit-only checking account and paste its IBAN (International Bank Account Number) on your website, telling people to setup a recurring payment through their online banking and put their e-mail address or some other ID number in the message field so you can link it back to their account. All that for the price of a checking account, which wouldn't be much more than 10€/month. It's a bit of a barebones system; you wouldn't use it to handle 1000+ subscribers because the linking-back-to-their-account step would be manual. If you're on the scale of 10-100 subscribers with monthly or yearly payments, it works great. Several podcasts I listen to take donations like this.

Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#46

Post by jaredsohn »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #26
sitkack wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some banks let you automate Zelle, too. Citibank doesn't but Chase does.

Re: Things to know before starting a Patreon page

#47

Post by baud147258 »

majewsky wrote: post #45
executesorder66 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's mentioned in the middle of the post: > I moved to a combination of Quickbooks Online ($645/year; note that Intuit is a terrible company) and Squarespace’s ($480/year) recurring products feature. But the squarespace's recurring products feature seems focused more toward physical products than digital creative artifacts which I mainly associate Patreon with.

It's always hilarious how broken the American banking system is that you need to pay over $1000/year worth of tooling to receive recurring payments from patrons. In the EU, you would just open a deposit-only checking account and paste its IBAN (International Bank Account Number) on your website, telling people to setup a recurring payment through their online banking and put their e-mail address or some other ID numb…

Are you sure the bank would accept something like this? Wouldn't they change the account to a business account, to deal with things like taxes?
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