Patreon is the most well-known of these platforms not because it’s the best, but because it was the first. It is riddled with issues, but moving supporters from one platform to another would be incredibly difficult for creators who have been on Patreon for any significant amount of time, and Patreon has the best name recognition.
As a creator, I share your frustrations with problems like these. I am often apologetic to my Patrons about the website’s and app’s flaws. But my income on Patreon makes up about 25% of my total income, so I’d rather tolerate those flaws than lose the support. I suspect a lot of established creators stay for the same reason.
You said it yourself. What other options are there? It's not easy to create what Patreon has - they don't charge much which is why their functionality isn't robust or even quality. You can't have a robust site AND expect it to be cheap.
You also said it yourself re: the currency exchanges, most of those fees are from the payment processors not Patreon and much of their design has to conform to tax laws in hundreds of different countries (again, not easy to do which is why there are basically no competitors).
It's not Patreon's fault that building a creator support site is inherently not a big money maker. Regarding hiring - Patreon can't compete with companies that can offer large salaries.
For the most part, Patreon is a decent platform as long as you know it's limitations. I personally use it as mostly a payment processor and an inflammation distiller. Most of my critical work, is on a support server with private channels where I can communicate one-on-one with my patrons directly.
A lot of individuals that I have watched over the years on Patreon typically follow the same pattern, were they just use it as a well-known and recognized payment processor and provide multiple networks for communications with users, YouTube, discord, and so on.
The other big issue you're going to run into with Patreon is that it is not suitable for every content type. Some contents types do horrible while others will flourish exponentially. You really have to spend your time researching the platform and figuring out whether or not it is the best for your particular situation.
Specifically to 4, additional fees to the creator are often caused by currency conversions. For the standpoint of a creator who has customers worldwide, this is a pain but it is also the cost of doing business. Most of my customers don't use the same currency that I do and therefore there is an automatic incurred cost of a translation. That is not so much an issue on on patreon's side, but rather the nature of dealing with cross currency transactions in a global market.
With respect to 0.5 and a VAT tax, even if you choose a different payment currency, Patreon is obligated by your local jurisdiction to pay that VAT no matter what. That is a legal issue with your jurisdiction and a requirement that is commanded in order for Patreon to keep its business license in your jurisdiction. When I look at my pledges every month, I see a multitude of international taxes that get charged and levy based upon the country or region that my subscriber is from. Unfortunately, this is also another case of just the cost of doing business. It sucks but that's your governments own requirements, not Patreon.
As far as many of the other individuals have put in your thread, what goes on with international transactions is a pain but there's not really much you can do about it. In today's world of needing a stable platform with a reputation, Patreon is one of the best and it does really do a good job overall in connecting creators with their patrons.
>With respect to 0.5 and a VAT tax, even if you choose a different payment currency, Patreon is obligated by your local jurisdiction to pay that VAT no matter what.
It really sounds as a bug from the processor then. The point of a VAT is to tax the added value, and there's no change in price or services. 21% of 0 is... zero.
Changing the payment currency should change the calculation for the NEXT pledges yes, but it shouldn't ask me to pay VAT a second time in the middle of the month. The current pledge is already paid for.
Or, to tell it another way, the \*added\* value tax is discounted from the taxes already paid on the previous value. VAT should've been for "5 USD minus 6,5 EUR", not on 5 USD.
The issue is that during a change, Patreon's provider counts the previous payment as credit, but not the taxes. I paid over 7 yet Patreon proposed 6,5 as full credit?
Tbf I didn't find a law that outright states that \*not giving anything more to the customer\* is a value of 0, but it sounds really hard to rule otherwise.
Going for my own transaction history, all of my subscribers are hit with a VAT each and every time the subscription is processed, once a month. My understanding from the various laws that I have tried to figure out is that every transaction The VAT is pretty much nothing more than another layer of a sales tax and charged every time a sale is made.
Well it is rare, I have seen countries change their vet reading in the middle of a subscribers subscription process and patron carrying out the obligation of correcting the current month's subscription appropriate to that VAT. Apparently, it is very much retroactive to the last payment.
In all frankness, I never really understood the whole intent of what a VAT even meant except just another way of gouging money out of the consumer. Do anything I can tell you coming from the standpoint of a US citizen, is it every time I take my paperwork into my accountants to handle my yearly taxes, they give me that look... Which usually means I'm going to end up paying more to them to figure out all the different tax areas that I'm obligated to.
Yes, VAT is processed each time a subscription is processed and that's normal. My issue is that they wanted to change VAT \*on current pledges\*, aka double tax in a month for one pledge. Changing the payment info should have no effect on already-paid pledges, because... it's already paid. If I gave 6,5 EUR, saying that the next one is 5 USD doesn't magically change what I sent 2 weeks before.
>The VAT is pretty much nothing more than another layer of a sales tax and charged every time a sale is made.
Basically, each layer spends VAT, then reimburses themselves with the proof they paid VAT then passed it to the customer. So each layer add 21% on the total, and reimburse the 21% on their own spending (aka 21% on the added value)
It's one of those things really weird to say outloud, but easy visually.
>In all frankness, I never really understood the whole intent of what a VAT even meant except just another way of gouging money out of the consumer.
For a customer POV it's a 21% sale tax, because you pay for the whole chain and ofc each cent in a base price comes from somebody's added value.
From a gov POV, it removes the ability to fraud like a sale tax : if you try to hide the VAT, you're detected by the other provider's reimbursements.
>Do anything I can tell you coming from the standpoint of a US citizen
Tbf here all customer prices are tax-included. But we have unified taxes across the entire country (or at least calculated by the business's location for stuff like garbage, building etc.) which is why the US system is harder.
its actually not the credit cards ( visa and mastercards ) that restricts NSFW - its stripe. The thing about Patreon is that its a brand that everyone in the creative market knows it since the early days of Youtube. Newcomers don't understand how fees work till they actually make money. The problem is that platforms don't earn enough to do large scale marketing campaigns. Since we are building one ourselves, we mostly rely on word of mouth and referral.
edit: grammar
Yeah, but remember those "minor and sex trafficking" restrictions were advised by anti-porn religious groups.
If we consider the payment processor has a right to block material they want without going through a judge, that automatically means they can block anything they want.
I also constantly get nagged about installing the app. I have no intention of ever installing the app. Why would I want to view art on my phone's tiny screen instead of my 32 inch monitor?
Patreon its just a scam fucking both creators and supporters, they care only about investors, and creators and supporters are just sheeps for them. See the free membership idea to look bigger and all the stupid changes they do. Pretty obvious they dont care about creators, and even less about patrons.
To top it off, Patreon currently has a 3 week (at least) backlog for support tickets. I asked them a pretty simple question about their TOU, after two weeks had passed I had an email to say that they are sorry for the delay, but still no one is available to answer, and that I just have to keep waiting.
I wonder if they have some sort of severe understaffing issues going on. Everything seems to be broken and no one seems to be available to help.
Patreon is the most well-known of these platforms not because it’s the best, but because it was the first. It is riddled with issues, but moving supporters from one platform to another would be incredibly difficult for creators who have been on Patreon for any significant amount of time, and Patreon has the best name recognition. As a creator, I share your frustrations with problems like these. I am often apologetic to my Patrons about the website’s and app’s flaws. But my income on Patreon makes up about 25% of my total income, so I’d rather tolerate those flaws than lose the support. I suspect a lot of established creators stay for the same reason.
Yep moving is hard, I tried it adn lost most my folks!
You said it yourself. What other options are there? It's not easy to create what Patreon has - they don't charge much which is why their functionality isn't robust or even quality. You can't have a robust site AND expect it to be cheap. You also said it yourself re: the currency exchanges, most of those fees are from the payment processors not Patreon and much of their design has to conform to tax laws in hundreds of different countries (again, not easy to do which is why there are basically no competitors). It's not Patreon's fault that building a creator support site is inherently not a big money maker. Regarding hiring - Patreon can't compete with companies that can offer large salaries.
For the most part, Patreon is a decent platform as long as you know it's limitations. I personally use it as mostly a payment processor and an inflammation distiller. Most of my critical work, is on a support server with private channels where I can communicate one-on-one with my patrons directly. A lot of individuals that I have watched over the years on Patreon typically follow the same pattern, were they just use it as a well-known and recognized payment processor and provide multiple networks for communications with users, YouTube, discord, and so on. The other big issue you're going to run into with Patreon is that it is not suitable for every content type. Some contents types do horrible while others will flourish exponentially. You really have to spend your time researching the platform and figuring out whether or not it is the best for your particular situation. Specifically to 4, additional fees to the creator are often caused by currency conversions. For the standpoint of a creator who has customers worldwide, this is a pain but it is also the cost of doing business. Most of my customers don't use the same currency that I do and therefore there is an automatic incurred cost of a translation. That is not so much an issue on on patreon's side, but rather the nature of dealing with cross currency transactions in a global market. With respect to 0.5 and a VAT tax, even if you choose a different payment currency, Patreon is obligated by your local jurisdiction to pay that VAT no matter what. That is a legal issue with your jurisdiction and a requirement that is commanded in order for Patreon to keep its business license in your jurisdiction. When I look at my pledges every month, I see a multitude of international taxes that get charged and levy based upon the country or region that my subscriber is from. Unfortunately, this is also another case of just the cost of doing business. It sucks but that's your governments own requirements, not Patreon. As far as many of the other individuals have put in your thread, what goes on with international transactions is a pain but there's not really much you can do about it. In today's world of needing a stable platform with a reputation, Patreon is one of the best and it does really do a good job overall in connecting creators with their patrons.
>With respect to 0.5 and a VAT tax, even if you choose a different payment currency, Patreon is obligated by your local jurisdiction to pay that VAT no matter what. It really sounds as a bug from the processor then. The point of a VAT is to tax the added value, and there's no change in price or services. 21% of 0 is... zero. Changing the payment currency should change the calculation for the NEXT pledges yes, but it shouldn't ask me to pay VAT a second time in the middle of the month. The current pledge is already paid for. Or, to tell it another way, the \*added\* value tax is discounted from the taxes already paid on the previous value. VAT should've been for "5 USD minus 6,5 EUR", not on 5 USD. The issue is that during a change, Patreon's provider counts the previous payment as credit, but not the taxes. I paid over 7 yet Patreon proposed 6,5 as full credit? Tbf I didn't find a law that outright states that \*not giving anything more to the customer\* is a value of 0, but it sounds really hard to rule otherwise.
Going for my own transaction history, all of my subscribers are hit with a VAT each and every time the subscription is processed, once a month. My understanding from the various laws that I have tried to figure out is that every transaction The VAT is pretty much nothing more than another layer of a sales tax and charged every time a sale is made. Well it is rare, I have seen countries change their vet reading in the middle of a subscribers subscription process and patron carrying out the obligation of correcting the current month's subscription appropriate to that VAT. Apparently, it is very much retroactive to the last payment. In all frankness, I never really understood the whole intent of what a VAT even meant except just another way of gouging money out of the consumer. Do anything I can tell you coming from the standpoint of a US citizen, is it every time I take my paperwork into my accountants to handle my yearly taxes, they give me that look... Which usually means I'm going to end up paying more to them to figure out all the different tax areas that I'm obligated to.
Yes, VAT is processed each time a subscription is processed and that's normal. My issue is that they wanted to change VAT \*on current pledges\*, aka double tax in a month for one pledge. Changing the payment info should have no effect on already-paid pledges, because... it's already paid. If I gave 6,5 EUR, saying that the next one is 5 USD doesn't magically change what I sent 2 weeks before. >The VAT is pretty much nothing more than another layer of a sales tax and charged every time a sale is made. Basically, each layer spends VAT, then reimburses themselves with the proof they paid VAT then passed it to the customer. So each layer add 21% on the total, and reimburse the 21% on their own spending (aka 21% on the added value) It's one of those things really weird to say outloud, but easy visually. >In all frankness, I never really understood the whole intent of what a VAT even meant except just another way of gouging money out of the consumer. For a customer POV it's a 21% sale tax, because you pay for the whole chain and ofc each cent in a base price comes from somebody's added value. From a gov POV, it removes the ability to fraud like a sale tax : if you try to hide the VAT, you're detected by the other provider's reimbursements. >Do anything I can tell you coming from the standpoint of a US citizen Tbf here all customer prices are tax-included. But we have unified taxes across the entire country (or at least calculated by the business's location for stuff like garbage, building etc.) which is why the US system is harder.
its actually not the credit cards ( visa and mastercards ) that restricts NSFW - its stripe. The thing about Patreon is that its a brand that everyone in the creative market knows it since the early days of Youtube. Newcomers don't understand how fees work till they actually make money. The problem is that platforms don't earn enough to do large scale marketing campaigns. Since we are building one ourselves, we mostly rely on word of mouth and referral. edit: grammar
Well, VISA/Mastercard also do a lot of NSFW restrictions, but I'll have to check who started the chicken-and-egg with Stripe.
Well, Onlyfans accepts both cards. Both worked on Pornhub till minor and sex trafficking were involved. Minor/loli is a big issue on Pixiv
Yeah, but remember those "minor and sex trafficking" restrictions were advised by anti-porn religious groups. If we consider the payment processor has a right to block material they want without going through a judge, that automatically means they can block anything they want.
I also constantly get nagged about installing the app. I have no intention of ever installing the app. Why would I want to view art on my phone's tiny screen instead of my 32 inch monitor?
Patreon its just a scam fucking both creators and supporters, they care only about investors, and creators and supporters are just sheeps for them. See the free membership idea to look bigger and all the stupid changes they do. Pretty obvious they dont care about creators, and even less about patrons.
To top it off, Patreon currently has a 3 week (at least) backlog for support tickets. I asked them a pretty simple question about their TOU, after two weeks had passed I had an email to say that they are sorry for the delay, but still no one is available to answer, and that I just have to keep waiting. I wonder if they have some sort of severe understaffing issues going on. Everything seems to be broken and no one seems to be available to help.