Seeking feedback on idea: alternative to Patreon

[perldiver.livejournal.com]

Hi folks,

I messaged a few of you about this already, but was just given mod permission to post it at top level.

I’m a Patreon creator (http://patreon.com/davidstorrs), and a web developer. My business partner and I are frustrated enough with Patreon that we’re building an alternative. We’d like to make sure it does what people actually want so, if you have a minute, I’d really appreciate your feedback.

We think the site should have:

* No percentage taken from your pledges
* Charge patrons immediately to avoid in-and-out “pledge-dodgers”
* Content management for all your content, past and present
* Specify when things should become visible (a.k.a. a publishing queue)
- ...to whom
- ...and for how long
* Ban abusive or exploitative patrons

As far as creators go, our current plan is that early adopters would receive as much storage as they need (within reason!), and future creators would get 1GB of storage for $9.99/month. Again, these are tentative plans and might change as we do more research.

All comments appreciated; a few questions I'd love answers to:

1) Does this sound like a service you would use?

2) Are there any other features you’d like?

3) What is particularly good about Patreon?

4) What issues do you have with Patreon?

Comments

[everainsley]

Personally, I would be turned away by a flat fee, especially before I start making money on a project. I'm not very well known, so it's not like I have a huge follower base. I'd rather have a percentage taken out, at least until I reached a steady income and could have the option of "You can go with a flat-rate here, or continue having a percentage deducted from pledges."

One of my issues with Patreon is that, due to payment service rules, things with "adult" content are not vieweable to someone searching. This is all well and good to keep the kiddies away, but the project I have for funding on my Patreon right now is not adult, but will skirt to some mature themes later on. This is a case of "How do I mark this? Do I risk having it shut down or deal with less exposure?"

I would like to be able to, say, send something to someone who pledges X-amount right away, but then after they've been subbed for say 3 mos, I can move them into a different tier of stuff.

I do like the idea of payment taken right then, so they are not signing up, getting the tier stuff, then withdrawing support before they are charged.

One of the issues I've had with my Patreon is I wanted to have pledges per page, since my project is a webcomic. Patreon kept reverting to per week. But the idea of per page was to add extra pages each week, based on pledge tiers. I finally gave up and set everything as monthly, though that meant I changed the pledge tier prices.

[gatekat.livejournal.com]

Your problem with # of comic pages has me a bit confused. Last I looked, you get paid for each thing you post, up to the payer's max. If you post more pages, you get paid more.

[everainsley]

Part of the issues is Patreon's layout, and lack of "This is what this thing means." I have some issues and I need good, clear documentation as to what everything does. (I had a Patreon account for months before I set it live.)

My update schedule is 2 pages/week, so I had tiers priced for that (I think it was $1/page). I would change where it said "week" to "page" and set everything else up... and it would revert all the text that said "page" back to "week." Repeatedly. Which is why it took me months to finally set my Patreon as live.

[perldiver.livejournal.com]

You can either be paid per time period or per creation. So, "I pledge $5 for every page you produce" or "I pledge $5 every month". The creator chooses one of the other when setting up the campaign.

[everainsley]

Well, part of the issues is that, as mentioned, I would tell it to show "page" and it would only show week or month, when my update schedule was twice a week.

People read as little as they possibly can, so the fact it wouldn't change that display to be what I wanted is a fairly big issue for me.