It looks like our pinned message was lost due to a change in Patreon's page design! We have a visual ad for our project, but please keep reading for the details!
What is this project?
CATastrophe is a romance story about the coming of age of Milo, an orphan from the big city, who sets out to find a job on a ranch. It's a story of first love, complicated relationships and romance. The story contains adult (18+) content with a mostly gay focus, however only when it serves the plot. 90% of the story will not be explicit content! This is a stern reminder: for those looking for adult-first, plot-second comics, this likely isn't the story for you. This story deals with the troubles of young romance, LGBT feelings, complex emotions and deep topics. The art and story is a passion project for the team of creators who make it, and we hope you'll love the complicated and “human” characters as much as our regular readers do!
IMPORTANT:
This project is the work of five or more artists and over 6 years of our current invested time. This project is a subscription-based, serial project, you will receive sections (chapters) of this story for each month's subscription – YOU WILL NOT RECEIVE THE ENTIRE BACK CATALOGUE IN ONE MONTH. The 1300+ pages of this project were funded by monthly support from other patrons, and we ask new patrons to pay similar dues. With the 350-450 clients on this project, we find the fairest and most balanced option to offer the project to new subscribers at a similar rate: this uses a “Train Cart” serial purchase model.
For the first month's purchase, a new subscriber will get the first 105 pages of the project, immediately receiving the first year's content from the story back when Patreon levels, and page count, was low per month.
For each additional month's subscription, you will receive another section of the comic, these are paced out to match the same rate our current subscribers see of the comic – everyone will see around 20-25 pages a month, depending on their complexity (the number of panels and characters).
This means that new clients will be behind in the comic releases (in an earlier “train cart” along the tracks, if you will). We offer for subscribers to buy multiple months of back-dated releases per calendar month (so you could spend 3x $6 to buy the releases from 10.2017). However, as theft prevention, we do not allow clients to purchase the entire back catalog of CATastrophe. At a certain point in the original release schedule (12.2018, for example), you will only be able to buy one month's releases per month: this “time wall” does not allow new subscribers to move too far “up the train” after a certain point (though this threshold moves further forward every year).
You will reach the latest pages some time later than those who came before you. There are no exceptions to this rule, though we do allow long-time subscribers the chance to move closer to the most recent release date each year with a special event that ignores the “one release per month” rule beyond a certain date.
We have further information regarding this business model: please read below if you're interested.
This sale method was designed to solve a series of problems, and make purchasing the comic fairer for everyone: especially those who supported us in the earliest months of our project.
Our current funding allows us to move at a very fast speed, creating around 15-20 pages a month, the number of pages varies based on the complexity, determined by the number of characters in a page. With that said, the 20 pages covers around 40 full color character arts a month – the price each subscriber pays a month for that amount of art is pretty reasonable, we think.
during the first few years of promotion, you will receive more pages. But in some months, their number may decrease noticeably, slowly increasing in future months.
We use this payment and rate model to be as fair as possible, latecomers who are buying previously created pages are investing in the speed of releases the same as older supporters. In this model we also adjust the number of pages EVERYONE sees a month! When we got a much larger number of supporters, it became fairer to adjust the latecomer releases to get more pages: some early months, that had a lower rate of pages, have been combined to give a similar number of pages to what our older supporters (who get more recent releases) see a month.
This fairness is the theory we have built our business model around. Many other businesses that use Patreon offer all their back catalog of art for a single payment, with many patrons coming only once a year to collect a year's worth of content.
If we used this model, we both wouldn't have enough consistent supporters to create the rate of pages we do AND we would be offering significant discounts, only paying for a month's content to see years of our work: we respect our dedicated subscribers too much to disrespect them by allowing others to get their paid-for rewards for essentially free.
With our improved security, we have created DRM thief-tracking tools to identify who steals pages and distributes them off-website. Because of our policy of requiring ALL new subscribers to purchase all the pages, one release at a time, even with the option to buy multiple early months at once, if we identify a thief and kick them from our subscriber pool they cannot simply create a new account and get all the new content. They would have to spend either considerable time, or considerable money, or both, to reach the same point where they were kicked out before. It provides a considerable deterrent that allowing new users to buy everything with one purchase, or even buy everything in one large purchase, would completely negate. This is the safest business model to ensure honest users get the best deal and thieves get the worst deal.
With our current model a thief would have to pay for many months of content each time they tried to share something new, and buy more all over again the second time they joined, AND late-coming thieves would be held back months behind the newest content, even if they had a dedicated payment method (this also prevents fraudulent debit card reclamation from Patreon, which has a limit on the number of months you can claim). Honest supporters will have years, of the comic before the thief can even return to the point where they were kicked out.
As an extra deterrent, we intend to only offer our new projects to supporters who have subscribed to this comic. So even if a thief waited many years to finally distribute the entire comic, they would lose access to the next project we make!
We want to accept customers who support this project honestly, and as such, the earlier you join and the most earnestly you support, the faster you reach the last pages. If you decide to postpone it, you will actually increase the time it takes to reach the last pages on your own.
We value our work and don’t give it away for $ 6 a one-time payment.
If someone thinks the price of 6, 9 or 13 dollars is too high for a month of our team's work - you are simply not our client and you should probably look for other artists.
The main rule of our comic club is: not to steal.
Everything that you receive from us, should not be sent to anyone: not uploaded to the internet, emails, discord, telegram or other messengers. Any leak sooner or later (usually pretty quickly) comes to light, because we are subscribed to all the same channels where they are posted.
Each picture contains a system of hidden and unique tags (DRM) that allow us to establish who was issued each page. Each sponsor receives their own unique copy and, if that copy is available for free for any reason, the culprit's account will be blocked. Excuses such as “someone got access to my laptop and did it” are not considered valid excuses. We hope that you will treat your password as carefully as your bank card or phone. How your version of the comic is kept is entirely your responsibility. And your account.
One more nuance: a big group of artists have formed a “block list” where all those who like to cheat with charge backs or theft have been added. “Misplacing” our content online, or trying to charge back your payments after receiving content, will instantly add you to this list and you may find yourself losing access to many projects at once for violating the rules in one of them.
In our arrangement, you receive a non-physical copy, with private rights to the digital copy. You can use and save and read them, you can show them to a visiting friend (IRL, without using the Internet!) , we don't mind at all.
But if your friend makes copies of them and publishes them somewhere for free, your account will be blocked: this counts as distributing the comic. Please consider this nuance, and please respect our work. If we ever did intend to sell distribution rights to someone, it would be for a lot more than 20-30 cents a page. (Many tens of thousands of dollars - not 6, 9 or 13!
And a couple more important nuances: after finishing work on this project, only those who have reached the last pages in this project will have access to our next project. Thus, you should understand that in case of a leak, you will be blocked and lose all progress. Many years of progress.
And the second nuance:
The number of pages is directly linked to the amount of funding. Any leak leads to a decrease in funding, which in turn leads to a reduction in the number of pages that we will be able to make for you in the new month. The more funding, the more pages. The less funding, the fewer pages.
if you see a leak and are interested in this project not losing funding (and you get as many pages as possible every month), do not be lazy to report it in a private message. There is no need to do this publicly - advertising thieves' holes in our free galleries or crowdfunding sites is punishable by blocking. Private messages only.
In short, you will get a lot of pleasure from cooperation with our ToS. Otherwise, alas, we will part.
A few words about choosing the access level right away.
To avoid any problems with unfair distribution, we ask that you consider the level of monthly payments you make carefully at the start. Because of our business model of fair distribution, and to better manage the total payments customers have made, in order to raise your support to a higher quality level later, we ask that supporters back-pay for ALL the higher resolution rewards, just as though you had paid the higher price the whole time. This might not be too much if a $6 supporter decides to up their pledge to $14 a month or two in to paying for the comic, but if it was a year or two into the project it could cost a significant lump sum to not have delays with getting your new rewards.
Similarly, when lowering your access level, we ask that you save all pages in advance. When your access level decreases, our backup storage system will reset your permissions and you will no longer be able to recover the old high-resolution images (part of your the fee involves storage for so many large data files on our server). For this reason (and because it takes significant moderator time to restore files after they've been deleted) we ask our supporters to take care in preserving the files themselves, offline from our distribution server.
In the case of experiencing financial difficulties, you are able to pause your subscription. When your finances stabilize, and you are able to return, you'll be able to start again from the same point you already were at, so long as your account details don't drastically change (such as changing Patreon account). The only nuance in this is for our “early bird” supporters, the early bird supporter's reduced fee is based on their long-time sponsorship. Delayed payments for more than two months will result in the supporter forfeiting their special “Early Bird” discount that was based on their long-term, uninterrupted support. The supporter would need to change their pledge from $3 to $6, etc when they return.
And the last point - in the first 2-3 days of the month we are working on accounting. If you come on the 1-2 day of the month, be prepared for the fact that the access password will not be sent as quickly as on other days. And if you came a month earlier - keep in mind that new content in your account will appear on the 2-3 day of the month, not earlier.
Regarding VIP sponsorship.
Some of our clients enjoy our project so much that they are willing to pay higher sums to support us. As a way to thank these VIPs we started making bonus pages not related to the main story and characters. These are usually erotic or adult in nature with a lighthearted or funny tone. These rewards are currently on a delay, but thankfully the system of payments we keep track of allows us to give any rewards to the sponsors who paid for those particular months. Unfortunately we had an artist leave our team and we needed to train to replace them, we're now almost back up to full speed, if not even faster than before, so these rewards will be incoming soon!
If anyone has any other questions, leave a message here, or via PM, and I will give a more detailed answer.
upd: due to some whims of Apple, Patreon demands to change the payment processing mode. Now it happens on the 1-2 day of the month for everyone. But starting in November, it will be in the "payment will be debited from the new subscriber on the same day of the next month in which he came to us and made his first payment" mode. I'm not sure exactly how this will work exactly, but nothing will change for subscribers already present - unless they change their payment settings. For all new members of the club, I have to add important information:
1. If you are going to pay for a subscription through Apple, you should understand that Apple charges a huge commission (it seems 30% of each transaction) and this means that you will spend the same amount on a subscription as in the usual way - through the website and plus % of the Apple commission. I.e. it will cost a third more expensive.
2. It is optimal to make the first payment in the first days of the month, since our accounting department is focused on processing all data once a month in the first 1-4 days of the month and we do not have the opportunity to mess with it daily. Of course, if you have just arrived and made a payment, you will get access to the content within 24 hours (yes, this does not happen automatically for a number of reasons). But if your payment was made after the 5th day of the month, then in order for your subscription to be renewed regularly, you will need to cancel the subscription on the first day of the new month and resume it within 1-2 days of the month. Without this, your subscription will not be renewed next month and the renewal will resume only after another month. I.e., in fact, you will simply receive content with a delay of up to 25-26 days if we do not have time to process your payment in the first days of the month. Therefore, if you did not come on the first day of the month, do not forget to cancel and renew your subscription on the first day of the second month of your subscription. Alas, we cannot make it more convenient. The process of sending content on our part requires certain manual actions and all this fuss takes place in the first days of the month. Not for a month. Our whole system counts down exactly in increments of 1 month and we cannot change this.