[Patreon] Siderea's Patreon Fee Fiasco FAQ
Dec. 9th, 2017 03:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
siderea0. Siderea, what are you going to do?
No idea.
1. Are there alternatives to Patreon?
Yes and no. Mostly no.
See the rather out-of-date Great Snowdrift.coop List of Crowdfunding Platforms.
Also some leads at http://kittyspace.org/gettheshowon.pdf
If you are looking for an alternative for your own crowdfunding project, maybe one of those will work for you.
2. What about you? Are there any alternatives to Patreon that work for you, Siderea?
Not that I've found so far.
I use the by-work funding for a reason, as I explained on my Patreon page. It is what make crowdfunding plausibe for me. I simply cannot handle a monthly production requirement (nor any other fixed time frame), so the prevailing monthly model doesn't work for me.
Also, it is my educated guess that doing by-work is ultimately substantially more lucrative than by-month, for me, with my style of work, my erratic posting schedule, and how my patrons relate to my work. I very strongly suspect that if I went to by-month, not only would it completely stress me out, it would result in a dramatic net loss of income.
There are almost no platforms that support by-work, instead of by-period. Just three. One has a month embargo on your funds (you don't get your January pledges until March 1) and is in Euros, one is invite-only and I'm not invited (and also looks like a fiasco waiting to happen), and the other is Patreon.
There is a feature request over at Liberapay to add the by-work model. I'm not sure Liberapy would work for me for a number of reasons. I seems... kinda sketchy and ideologue-y. I'm not sure I would feel comfortable asking my patrons to entrust their credit card numbers to these folks; I'm not sure I would feel comfortable trusting my payment information to them!
3. Have you noticed that you're hard to support?
Yes, I've noticed.
In addition to the by-work requirement and the requirement that I be able to trust the transaction platform, there's also the requirement that the transaction platform doesn't map me. I need to be confident that if I sign up with a crowdfunding platform, they'll keep my wallet name confidential. It needs to be that paying me isn't a security loophole through which people can map me. Patreon mostly succeeded in doing this, though they did have a security breach. But it was never the case that someone could buy my wallet name from Patreon for the cost of a minimum pledge.
It would be also nice if the platform allows one person – with one legal identity – to have more than one account under different names, that are not connected. Not a feature I'm currently using, but one I asked about before signing up at Patreon so I could if I wanted to. (I was thinking that I might some day want to get back into the arranging early dance music business, or do that listening-through-history podcast idea I had, or....)
No idea.
1. Are there alternatives to Patreon?
Yes and no. Mostly no.
See the rather out-of-date Great Snowdrift.coop List of Crowdfunding Platforms.
Also some leads at http://kittyspace.org/gettheshowon.pdf
If you are looking for an alternative for your own crowdfunding project, maybe one of those will work for you.
2. What about you? Are there any alternatives to Patreon that work for you, Siderea?
Not that I've found so far.
I use the by-work funding for a reason, as I explained on my Patreon page. It is what make crowdfunding plausibe for me. I simply cannot handle a monthly production requirement (nor any other fixed time frame), so the prevailing monthly model doesn't work for me.
Also, it is my educated guess that doing by-work is ultimately substantially more lucrative than by-month, for me, with my style of work, my erratic posting schedule, and how my patrons relate to my work. I very strongly suspect that if I went to by-month, not only would it completely stress me out, it would result in a dramatic net loss of income.
There are almost no platforms that support by-work, instead of by-period. Just three. One has a month embargo on your funds (you don't get your January pledges until March 1) and is in Euros, one is invite-only and I'm not invited (and also looks like a fiasco waiting to happen), and the other is Patreon.
There is a feature request over at Liberapay to add the by-work model. I'm not sure Liberapy would work for me for a number of reasons. I seems... kinda sketchy and ideologue-y. I'm not sure I would feel comfortable asking my patrons to entrust their credit card numbers to these folks; I'm not sure I would feel comfortable trusting my payment information to them!
3. Have you noticed that you're hard to support?
Yes, I've noticed.
In addition to the by-work requirement and the requirement that I be able to trust the transaction platform, there's also the requirement that the transaction platform doesn't map me. I need to be confident that if I sign up with a crowdfunding platform, they'll keep my wallet name confidential. It needs to be that paying me isn't a security loophole through which people can map me. Patreon mostly succeeded in doing this, though they did have a security breach. But it was never the case that someone could buy my wallet name from Patreon for the cost of a minimum pledge.
It would be also nice if the platform allows one person – with one legal identity – to have more than one account under different names, that are not connected. Not a feature I'm currently using, but one I asked about before signing up at Patreon so I could if I wanted to. (I was thinking that I might some day want to get back into the arranging early dance music business, or do that listening-through-history podcast idea I had, or....)
(no subject)
Date: 2017-12-23 04:26 am (UTC)Whether a non-profit can make this work is of course the question. I see they're a fork of Gratipay, so at least know through hard experience of some of the risks involved. I would guess it'll depend on whether they can reach a level where they're funding the people needed to take care of the financial and other aspects of things before something major goes wrong. If they do reach that point, I don't see any reason why they shouldn't then survive long-term.
Anyway, it looks like they're receiving one kind of stress test at the moment...
https://liberapay.com/about/stats
Note the Deposits graph and its recent spike.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-12-23 04:47 am (UTC)If they do reach that point, I don't see any reason why they shouldn't then survive long-term.
Really, what could possibly go wrong?