Hello there, Young's speaking. I wanted to personally deliver the news regarding the changes we're making to our Patreon account currency and what it means to our players. To preface this post, I want to clarify that this change is mostly practical and we tried our best to ensure the prices will remain at relatively the same level as they were.
Starting tomorrow, 8th of July, we will be changing the base currency of our membership prices from USD to EUR. Below you can find the detailed breakdown of reasons behind this change, how it will affect existing members, and how we are adjusting prices to avoid overcharging our supporters.
Why are we changing currency?
Most of our team is based in Europe, which means that our main currency used for paying salaries, taxes, and contractor fees is EUR. Since we have been using USD to set tier prices until this moment, we were subject to very rough conversion fees whenever we wanted to payout funds from Patreon to our local bank account. To give you some perspective, in the last few months alone we had to pay around $2.000 in unnecessary fees to payment processors or banks if we wanted to use the money we earned.
We firmly believe that neither our team, nor the supporters backing this project are interested in seeing the money contributed to the development of Academy34 being wasted in this manner, so we decided that changing currency used to set our prices is the correct way to go, which will eliminate this problem entirely.
How will it affect existing members?
Short answer — it won't. Any members with a currently active subscription will continue paying the same amount, unless they manually cancel their existing pledge. That applies to both monthly and annual subscriptions.
This change will only apply to new members, or members who cancel their existing subscription and start a new one after a while.
Can you still use the same payment methods?
Yes! This change only impacts the currency in which we, as developers, receive your pledges once the transaction has been processed. You will still be able to use the same payment methods you used before.
How are we adjusting the pricing?
First and foremost, our goal was not to increase the tier prices and we are doing our best to ensure the impact of these changes will be kept minimal when it comes to the amount you, as supporter, pay for any given tier. We'd like to think that our tiers were already reasonably priced in terms of perks they provide, and we have no interest in overcharging our players.
Below you can see the list of updated tier prices in EUR, which were decided based on the current exchange rate and kept as close to the existing prices as possible. The final price for people paying in currencies other than EUR will be higher than before because Patreon uses its own conversion method, but we tried to keep this difference within a reasonable amount.
Updated tier prices:
Cadet — €2
Private — €5
Officer — €9
Commander — €18
General — €30
High Council — €45
We are incredibly thankful to all of our supporters and we'll do our best to ensure these changes will have minimal effect on your overall experience interacting with our project. Stay tuned for more news about the upcoming updates, because we have much to share!