Note: I am still recovering from left-hand (of darkness) carpal tunnel surgery, with stitches scheduled out on Friday. But work and Halloween wait on no primate, so I'm going to try to get all the October rewards up before pain takes over. Thank you all for your patience and support while I invest in the radical future of Not Being In Pain Always All the Time. You are all my heroes, and it will never be otherwise. Hold tight.
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Ughhhh I DON'T LIKE MAKING THIS POST ANY MORE THAN YOU'RE GONNA LIKE READING IT.
No one wants to read about website changes, and holy shit I promise no creative on Patreon wants to spend any time at all writing about what's up on the backend around here.
BUT WE HAVE TO SO LET'S GET THROUGH THIS TOGETHER.
Despite running a very successful website that allows artists all over the world to actually make a steady living and create more art, and despite the fact that THERE IS NO NEED TO FUCK WITH THIS VERY WINNING FORMULA EVERYONE LIKES...Patreon is once again going to fuck with their formula.
On November 1st, most Patreons will switch over to charging 30% more per patron IF AND ONLY IF YOU SIGN UP THROUGH THE PATREON APP or otherwise utilize the Apple AppStore when you subscribe to a creator., in order to pay Apple's fees.
This one will not, because there is a fiddly thing you can do to postpone it for another year, and I have toggled that fiddle or whatever. Patreon has not made this an obvious thing you can do, because of course they haven't, and if you are also a creator and need instructions, leave a comment.
Again, let me repeat: this Patreon will not be converting for another year. And if you are already a patron of me or anyone else, none of this applies to you unless and until you want to change your tier.
Now, Patreon has given us all a choice of eating that 30% or letting our patrons cover it, but let's be real, very, very few Patreons can afford to cut their earnings by a third overnight. We don't have a lot of choice but to let Patreon increase the fees ONCE AGAIN, ONLY THROUGH THE APP.
I keep capitalizing, bolding, and italicizing these comments because there's a pretty simple fix here that causes none of us any issues or extra fees: DON'T USE THE APP TO SIGN UP FOR ANYONE OR CHANGE YOUR TIERS.
All this is ostensibly happening because Apple charges that fee and I guess Patreon doesn't want to cover it anymore, but they also want to drive more traffic to their (very not good) app, so this is their solution, which naturally creates a lot more problems.
So my recommendation for you and anyone considering signing up for a paid membership to any creator is to just ignore the app and make all your transactions on a desktop, which is annoying (maybe), but saves both you and I all that money.
As usual, this is not my, nor any other Patreon creator's fault or choice, we are at the mercy of digital CEOs like everyone else. Most creators I know are...peeved...to use a nice word.
In conclusion, Patreon, please do not ruin yourself Elon Musk-style looking for infinite growth, a whole lot of people need this place to live.
Postscript: if you are a free member reading this, hi! One of Patreon's previous amazing choices was to slap a subscribe button on everyone's front page that strongly implied clicking that button was all you had to do to get all the content...yet said button only linked to a free membership with no clear path to the actual tiers and information. FUN.
If you meant to subscribe in a way that got you the essays, recipes, work-in-progress excerpts, photo essays, access to the Discord, etc, please go and sign up for a tier! Almost 750 people signed up before I figured out how to turn that button off, and...you know...probably at least one or two of those wanted to see the stuff I actually do here. Hope to see some of you join the fold!