The "the point is to get money into the creator's hands" is a good point.Stranger wrote: ↑Sun Dec 10, 2017 7:26 amI'm fine with Patreon charging the person making the pledge simply because the point of Patreon is to put the money in the creator's pockets. To me it makes more sense for more of the money to go to the person you're pledging to, if you're pledging to someone.
However, on the point of the 35 cents:I can only imagine that this is to cover any overhead that the company has to deal with from transaction fees as well as putting money into the pockets of the people who run the website.2.9% + $0.35 will be paid by patrons for each individual pledge
And yeah, the $0.35 thing is because of transaction fees. They state that in the blog post.
Before they would charge a person once per month. It's not super clear to me, but it sounds like they will now charge you the moment you make a pledge or when a post is made for "pay per post" pledge. It's their solution to people "stealing rewards". So now instead of one charge per month, it could be dozens.
They should just move to a pre-paid model like liberapay. So that there are less transactions per month.
From what sense I can make, liberapay doesn't take any fees. There's just the transaction fee.rabidtictac wrote: ↑Sun Dec 10, 2017 7:39 amEven if patreon was taking 10% of all pledges for themselves, it's not like there's any other service offering a much better split.
Of course that site doesn't work for nobodies because it doesn't offer rewards for giving more.
Phelan is gonna put this to the test!AwesomePizza wrote: ↑Sun Dec 10, 2017 10:58 amYou can't review old movies and toys into your fifties.
Holy shit, it's true... Poonoo is spoony's biggest patron!Poonoo wrote: ↑Sun Dec 10, 2017 11:16 amI'm backing only a few people on patreon, but I get charged all of it on one transaction at the end of the month. So them adding this fee is stupid unless you are paying fuck all a month like $3 total or only $1 to one person. They should only add the fee if you are spending fuck all, but like TicTac said there is probably some other reason that makes logical sense but makes you sound like a prick if you go public.
Them charging everything at the end of the month is changing for new pledges. Existing "per month" pledges will be renewed at the beginning of the month. The thing that sounds shady to me is how they're applying the new fee to each pledge.
So, using poonoo as an example. I'm just going to say he is pledging $1 to 10 people.
In January, patreon will charge his account $13.79, which duplicates the $0.35 "transaction" fee 10 times despite only making one transaction on his card.
The non-shady way to do it would've been to charge $10.64, which has only one $0.35 transaction fee to match the one transaction they're making.
Where does the extra $3.15 cents go?
I might be completely wrong with how the above would actually happen. I haven't bothered to research enough to see if anyone really knows, but that's how "2.9% + $0.35 PER PLEDGE" sounds to me.
Adding a fee for people pledging a small total amount was just a thought that would be like small businesses having minimum amounts for credit/debit card purchases. If non burgers doesn't know, some small businesses, at least around me, require you to spend at least $5-10 to be able to use a card. A better solution would be a "pre-paid" model.
Unless I'm mistaken on how the new fees will be charged, I can't imagine the hidden reason being anything but "we want a way to make more money so our books will look better so we can charge whoever ends up buying us more."