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

[leahtaur.livejournal.com]

A Patreon competitor site would have to be at least as functional and, well, pretty, as Patreon for me to use it. Patreon's not perfect but their site looks modern and well put together and so the competitor site would have to quite frankly have a lot of work and shine put into it before I'd consider it.

I agree with many of the points listed already. I'd also like Patreon more if NSFW showed up in search results, perhaps with an age disclaimer and a box to check off before showing. And this is just a nice-to-have but what if creators could choose to promote their friends' accounts in a sidebar on their profile page? You can see what people contribute to but this would be more of a "like this page? You might also like these creators" sort of thing.

[perldiver.livejournal.com]

I don't see why NSFW content shouldn't be included although, as you suggest, there should definitely be a warning instead of the actual content.