[ryanatallah]

It seems very likely that the change was motivated by payment processor fees. Patreon uses Stripe to process payments, which charges a flat rate of 2.9% + $0.30 per successful charge. Compare that to the proposed fee patron fee structure of 2.9% + $0.35 — where presumably the extra $0.05 per transaction is the cut Patreon takes off the top for themselves.

[sago]

> the proposed fee patron fee structure of 2.9% + $0.35

The problem was that was per pledge. So if, like me, you support a couple dozen creators at $1-$3 each, you would expect to pay 24 x $.35. But all those payments are charged in one transaction. So they are only paying $.30. It isn't 5c per transaction they were planning to skim, but $8.

[stormbrew]

Part of the change was no longer aggregating the charges but running them through individually. They wouldn't have been pocketing most of the fees.

Which honestly makes it even more baffling an idea.

[Pyxl101]

You're assuming that Patreon will issue all of those charges at once.

However, they talk about that problem in the article. What if a Patreon supporter pledges/makes a subscription on Day 1, then another on Day 2, and a third on Day 3, and so on?

In their original blog post [1], they spoke about how, ideally, they'd issue each of those charges to the supporter immediately; and then begin recurring billing 30 days later after that date. However, if those charges are made on different days, and the anniversaries occur on different days going forward, then they don't have the opportunity to condense them into a single transaction.

Patreon are looking for a solution where someone can create a subscription, be billed for it immediately (i.e. not wait for beginning of next month), and then continue from there with recurring monthly payments. With a naive system each subscription would have its own cadence, preventing transaction consolidation. They also talk about how, if they have a standard monthly billing period, then there are issues with waiting until the next period to make the first charge.

Perhaps they didn't explain this as well as they could have, but it made sense to me. It seems like a "Patreon Wallet" could indeed be a solution to a lot of these problems. Refill your wallet with a single large transaction, then draw funds from it when pledging to support creators.

[1] https://blog.patreon.com/updating-patreons-fee-structure/

[ceejayoz]

Patreon's docs until recently noted that they get charged 1.9% by Stripe, so there's more than $0.05 being skimmed there.

[conductr]

Don't forget it's now 2.9% of $1.37 instead of $1.00. Reducing their piece by another 1 or 2 cents depending on how Stripe rounds

[ceejayoz]

Patreon does enough volume to qualify for discounts - their Stripe rate is 1.9%, not 2.9%. (This used to be on https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/204606125-How-..., but it's gone now.)

[hutzlibu]

minus their likely bargain with Stripe. I doubt they pay as much as a small customer.

[dsr_]

Whereas Paypal will apparently do 5% and 0.05, which makes the dollar go to $1.10 instead of $1.38.