It’s slightly awkward because — for reasons absolutely unrelated to the public relations disaster that Patreon put itself in* — the vagaries of the system have put me back down to only one dollar (and thirty eight cent**) pledge away from providing my patrons with a 3K short story every month. So if you’re interested in getting some dang good fiction and gaming material, check out my Patreon! From my point of view, there’s never been a better time, really.
*Short version: they changed the fee structure so that backers paid transaction fees instead of creators. This meant that everybody who pledged, for example, a buck a month is now paying a buck-thirty-eight; and the change almost seems designed to disproportionately hit people who do buck-minimum pledges (a two dollar pledge becomes a two dollar and forty one cent charge, and so forth). I haven’t lost anybody to the changes — yet — but most of the people I know who are on Patreon have. I was fine with eating the processing fees, myself, but they didn’t ask my opinion.
**Having to make clarifications like these is why I was happy with eating the processing fees.
Let’s be honest. Patreon just jacked their price by 38% without asking anyone. That is their right as a business. By golly its getting harder to defend the concept of “free business” these days.
What’s weird here is that I think that Patreon kind of expected creators to try to sell the changes to their backers, instead of the creators freaking out themselves. I also think that they made a big mistake with the “flat increase plus percentage thing:” the new model makes it noticeably more expensive to have ten one-dollar pledges than to have one ten-dollar one. I dunno why they did this, I just want to write things.