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]

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.