Patreon’s new fee structure makes smaller donations not really make sense.
Fox, would you consider setting up a Liberapay account?
i think i somehow missed all this controversy. i found a post by the questionable content guy and yeah it sounds like a pretty bad deal for people who donate.
especially if this part is correct:
What this effectively means is that if you give me a dollar, Patreon will charge you approximately $1.37. If you give another creator a dollar, they’ll charge you $1.37 for that too, even though the “fees” they have to pay on your pledges are charged as one lump sum by the credit processing companies.
it’s a disgusting move and makes me want to close the account altogether. i’d rather miss on 40 bucks every month than deal with people who consider this kind of shit acceptable.
this liberapay site looks okay except for them doing direct wire transfers which may cause problems because i’m in Russia depending on the bank they are using in France. you know with all the mutual idiocy between the west and our country nowadays.
there’s also paypal recurring donations i guess but i’m not sure how those work exactly and what are the fees. paypal is definitely preferable for me though.
e: gonna drop the patreon link from the frontpage.
They are dropping batch payments. That is why the fee hits every time. They have some reasoning for it, but not good enough I think.
Yes, what I’ve heard is that this is due to the prior batched payments system being abused by people who would sign up as a Patron of someone/thing, receive rewards/perks, and then cancel before their monthly batch payment was actually taken. So they’ve decided to always charge Patrons immediately instead, which means a CC charge per recipient they support.
Why they didn’t try amending T&Cs to say that once you’ve received rewards/perks for a month you WILL be charged and kept the batch charging I don’t know. This scheme may have the potential to run afoul of some consumer protection laws (i.e. in the EU you have the right to return remotely bought physical goods within a short time limit for a full refund, no questions asked).
Still, the upshot is that for small donations the donating party either eats the CC processing fee, or they have to be happy with the less money making it to the recipient.
regardless of the reason suddenly charging 40% of a dollar pledge is still ridiculous. deceptive wording in the email they have sent is a good indicator of the real reason - i.e. greed or disappointed investors or w/e, imo.
e: gothfox's profile - Liberapay i made a profile page, let’s see how this goes. if nothing else the site is less bloated than patreon.
There’s a word for that … reasoning: “greed”.
Moved my donation to paypal
cool, interestingly enough i get two emails from paypal for each new recurring donation
first one is about new predefined payment and the second one about the payment immediately failing and “we’re gonna try again in 5 days”
idk what’s this about
Yeah, I don’t know what this is about. Let me know if paypal doesn’t work, this is the first time I’m using it for recurring donations
Patreon have decided not to roll out the new payment system: We messed up. We’re sorry, and we’re not rolling out the fees change. | Patreon Blog
i’m down like 15 bucks a month though, thanks for nothing fuckers
e: that’s like half a bottle of whiskey right there, srs shit
e2: fuckers = patreon lol
regarding paypal recurring thing, i just got a second failed attempt for one donation because 5 days has passed. does it even work? who knows.
I switched over to paypal from patreon but if that’s not working what is your new preferred method short of shipping you the whiskey directly?
well let’s wait a few more days, if i get a few more repeat recurrent payment failed notifications from paypal i’ll post here. second best method is patreon, i guess, there’s basically no bullshit involved with them. normally, that is.
Switched back to patreon yesterday