Patreon Creators PSA

5

Greetings from Las Vegas to all my faithful followers, loyal friends, and random stumble uponers! It's fragging hot here! Like 108-112℉ hot! It's supposed to "cool" off to the low 100s this weekend; I'll take it.

Anyway, this is a Public Service Announcement to all Patreon Creators...

I didn't see any announcements, but I usually just gloss over the Patreon emails without fully reading them so I might have missed it. But I saw this on Twitter.

It appears that the PAY UP FRONT payment option is now out of beta and available to all creators. I checked my page and it was available. This is huge. With this option, no longer will you have to worry about stolen content... that is, people subscribing, grabbing all your available content, then canceling before they get charged.

With PAY UP FRONT, your new patrons are charged for the current month when they sign up. Then, on the first of the next month, they get charged for the next month. This eliminates the "free" patron who cancels before getting charged.

CAVEAT: once you switch to PAY UP FRONT, you can never go back to the regular monthly payment or pay per content item payment methods. But, in my opinion, it's worth losing those payment options.

Here's how you make the switch:

1. Log in to your Patreon account.

2. Go to your page.

3. Click the Editor button.

4. Click the Payments tab.

5. If your account is not verified, you will get a validation code sent to your phone. Enter it in the appropriate box (sorry, I don't know what it's called... my account was previously verified). If your account was previously verified, like mine, you can skip this step.

6. Click Save Changes.

And now you have switched to the PAY UP FRONT payment method. No more free content.

@missy, @rambo, @erikad and any other SG staff member who reads this... can you put this on the front page, please? There are a lot of ladies and photographers who use Patreon and may not know that this new payment option is now available for all creators. Thanks.

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Stay Tuned...

DeadGuitarist

VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
deadguitarist:
@xheartswornx, Patreon’s payment system is to batch as many payments together to reduce transaction fees for creators. That’s partly why their payment model is the way it is. But they listened to creators asking for the pay up front model because of all the ‘free’ patrons. As for disappearing content, most creators use Dropbox or some other cloud storage from which to serve their content. Not all of us can afford or want to pay for terabytes of space to store high resolution photos, which can be 10+ Mb each. That’s mostly why content is taken down periodically. Photographers, like myself, often do pay for additional cloud storage so that we can provide proofing galleries to clients and such. In my case, I have a VPS for my website host which comes with 40 Gb disk space. I serve all of my rewards from there. At some point, I will have to take down content, upgrade my VPS, or move the content to someplace like Google Drive or Dropbox where cloud storage is relatively cheap.
xheartswornx:
Makes sense! Thanks for that info. I know what you mean, but never realized it in relation to Patreon. In other things, though, there isn't as much of an excuse. Like I said, my qualms go back to limited gaming rewards and burgers available for a month. Seasonal ice cream or coffees make sense, but it's a big tease for no reason if it goes over well. I can accept cloud storage issues, thought. Makes sense.

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