This UI Change Could Have Prevented Patreon’s Fee Change Debacle

Patreon announced a new fee structure last week. It was intended to prevent the problem of “double charges” and allow them to roll out Charge Up Front to all users. People hated it. A lot. Today they canceled it, as I suspected/hoped they would.

How bad was it all? My campaign lost 10% of Patrons in under 24 hours, and I strongly suspect I won’t get all of them back. And from posts on Twitter, I was hardly the only one who lost a substantial amount of Patrons. That’s really not fun to experience, especially as someone who had nothing to do with the actual change at hand.

Patreon Screwed Up

I could actually write several articles on all the little problems with their proposed changes and their reasoning. But the biggest problems were such:

  1. Patreon moved the fees from Creators to Patrons, and added a 35 cent flat fee that drastically affected $1 pledges. This strongly discouraged Patrons from pledging the most common pledge amount of $1.
  2. Patreon did this because they came up with a brilliant new system that multiplied the amount of fees Patrons would have to pledge. This destroys the incentive to pledge to lots of creators.

That’s basically the coolest thing about Patreon gone: the ability to support lots of creators with small donations.

I’ll let Patreon’s own charts speak for how terrible the basic concept of their change was:

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