Patreon's Faulty Billing System

Hello everyone! This post is going to be business related once again... We are sorry, we should have dealt with these things when we started, but at the time we had little understanding of Patreon and managing a crowdfunded project.

Today, we'll be talking about our monetization model. We have already announced changes to our Patreon tiers and rewards and will also be updating our Patreon goals to make them more realistic and match our current project parameters. However, that's not as urgent now, so we will be laying out our plans here later.

A controversial topic is whether or not to charge patrons up-front. We have so far avoided it, given that we want to stay as consumer-friendly as possible; with charge-up-front, if one were to become a patron right at the end of a month, they would be getting charged once at the moment of joining and then once again when the new month rolled in.

With our current system you get immediate access to our patron-only posts, even if you haven't paid yet. On one hand it is convenient that you will get to see all of the exclusive content early, however you can access this content for free indefinitely given that you can just put up a pledge, never pay and then bail before the end of the month. You can repeat this cycle ad nauseam.

We do understand that there is a desire to see internal builds as early as possible or maybe some just don't want to pay until the final release of the game. However, we feel that this is unfair towards our patrons who do support us. Right now, the only things exclusive to patrons are the occasional WIP posts and a one month early access to builds. We currently don't have a build exclusive to patrons, but we're still seeing people try to cheat the system.

So, how do we deal with them? One solution is to avoid charging up front but write an internal bot, which distributes emails with all the exclusive stuff for the month. This would take a lot of time to set up, but it would also be a bit annoying to access. We have decided against this. Another option is to block every offender manually, but of course this also brings a lot of manual labour and judgement errors with it.

Ultimately we have decided to charge up front; this will only really make a difference for newcomers. It also deals with those who pay less and edit their pledges to a higher one, get a quick peek at the higher tier posts and then edit their pledge back to the lower amount before. We will begin charging up front starting from January 1st 2019.

It's unfortunate that Patreon itself is faulty enough still that creators need to look for ways to deal with exploiters, scammers and spam-bots. But before we give off the wrong impression, we haven't had many of these in the last months. Our experience with Patreon has been generally positive so far; we are merely trying to secure ourselves against this kind of practice becoming more popular or another wave of bots.