Regarding Reactivating This Patreon

I wanna preface this by saying that I'm sorry for my continued inactivity. Between real life obligations and other such things, I have not been able to keep up with writing as much as I hoped I would, and still now I have multiple commissions and Patreon-voted stories I still need to get through.

My original plan was to simply keep charges here on hold until I was through with all of those, and I could actually focus on delivering on what people subscribed to me through here were paying for. That has been taking far longer than I hoped it would, and if not completely it is at least partially my fault.

I was also planning to rework the various tiers I offered here, the first attempt was after all largely experimental. I wanted to condense different rewards, give people more for less money, and rework a couple of things that had proved to be putting too much work on me to properly keep up with it. And change charges to euros while I was at it, just for personal convenience.

However. There has been one consistent problem through these months, that has led me to consider the decisions I wanna propose here, and that has led me to derail my plans further by taking extra last-minute commissions or even basically begging people for money. As you might have guessed, that's what this is about.

Now, I want to be very clear: I am not in financial trouble of any kind. I have a house, I have food, and I have money. I don't want people throwing money at me because they think I need it, when there are others out there much more in need of it than I am. The actual problem is: All of the money I do have is walled off from the money I make online, and vice versa.

My PayPal account(s, one personal and one for smut) were, at one point, connected to my bank account. That connection was severed off, and reestablishing it would be a tedious process that might be invalidated if the bank cuts it again. That is on top of the long wait times to even get an appointment there, and on top of the current pandemic. The credit card associated to that account? It's been dry for years at this point, and again, the pandemic outside makes it a little hard to just go dump money into it. And at this point, it'll soon expire, so throwing too much into it wouldn't be wise.

So here's the thing. If I want to buy basically anything out there, I can do that no problem. If I want to buy anything online, be that games or Patreon subscriptions or art or what have you, I can only do that with money I already have online. And I only make that through commissions.

And, you guessed it, Patreon. I want to reiterate, this is not a life-or-death situation. I'm not getting my insurance cut, I'm not getting my heating shut off, I don't risk starving if you don't give me money. There are people out there who need it more than I do. This is purely, no doubt pettily and selfishly, a matter of convenience. If you gave me $70 now I can tell you it would probably go to one of those Sombra hoodies that are up for pre-order now (those do look amazing though, go check out Noxi Plushies @Noxi1_48 on Twitter).

So why am I talking about this, in a post that's frankly probably too long already? Well, here's the deal. If you're following me on Patreon, I assume you care about my shit enough to give me money just to see me write more of it. And I'm happy for that. And I got thinking, since I opened Patreon at first as more of a tip-jar than anything and only put up those tiers as a way to give people something back...

Would it be so bad if I just treated it as a tip-jar, for a while? Something people can give me money through just because they care about it and want to, because they enjoy my stuff, without expecting too much in return? Mind you, you'd still get something, I plan to share early access to my W.I.P. stories to all those that stick around (not much with how slowly I work recently, but still something). But you wouldn't necessarily get that request or short scene that maybe you subscribed here for.

So, and this also works as a TL;DR for those who skimmed through: Would it be okay if I were to reopen payments on Patreon, rework the tiers momentarily so everyone is the same and it's up to you how much you want to give me, and for a while just treat the site as a way for people to give me money out of their own interest and liking for my work with no hard promises of what they might get in return (aside from early access to whatever I'm working on, for ALL who still give me money)? Would other, hybrid solutions work better? What are your thoughts on all this?