IMPORTANT! Server hosting and costs - possible shutdown of Pitboss hosting!

[GermanJoey]

Even though we already hit $25, I just threw in a fiver - treat yourself to a beer on me.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Thanks for the support everyone. We're at 12 supporters for $31 "per creation" now, so that covers it on a monthly basis. If anyone else wants to contribute feel free to do so. If the contributions exceed the request that just means Caledorn will have to hit the post button less frequently. Thanks again everyone.

[Caledorn]

Hey guys! This is great! Thanks so much :-)

What I will do is create a specific PayPal account for this purpose, and I will leave any excess money above $25 per month in there as a buffer up to $75. If we reach that buffer I will ask you guys what you want to do - maybe someone can go inactive, or something, since a 3 month buffer is plenty.

Also I will post on the Patreon once per month, confirming the payment of the hosting costs. So there will be a monthly post that way regardless.

There may be better ways of dealing with this than Patreon, but I am not familiar with any other service that provides a monthly pledge like Patreon does offer. If anyone has any ideas, feel free to share! :-)

And while the offer of a beer is appreciated, I don't want to touch these donations for any other purpose than to pay the monthly server costs and/or refund the people who are donating in case that is desired or needed for any reason. :-)

- Cal

[Brian Shanahan]

I'll chip in my few squids then tomorrow.

[Caledorn]

For the sake of transparency, as promised; I haven't received the receipts from the server hosting provider - but I will provide them as soon as I have them here! I did a mistake for October, which meant that no money was withdrawn from the Patreons that month. So I am transferring slightly higher amounts for Nov, Dec and Jan to catch up with the missing cash from Oct. After that I'll save up 3 months in the Paypal account, and then notify you Patreons that there is enough to cover the costs for 3 months (since the total donations per month are currently above the actual server costs), and I can transfer some of the money back or you can do some mix-mashup to make sure that there is a rotation of who donates for what months or something. I would like to avoid having more than 3 months server costs available in the Paypal account. One possible way of handling it in the least complicated manner is that I simply just turn off the auto-charge for an occasional month on the Patreon page though, to keep things in balance. Ideas are welcome of course!

[Brian Shanahan]

For the sake of transparency, as promised; I haven't received the receipts from the server hosting provider - but I will provide them as soon as I have them here! I did a mistake for October, which meant that no money was withdrawn from the Patreons that month. So I am transferring slightly higher amounts for Nov, Dec and Jan to catch up with the missing cash from Oct. After that I'll save up 3 months in the Paypal account, and then notify you Patreons that there is enough to cover the costs for 3 months (since the total donations per month are currently above the actual server costs), and I can transfer some of the money back or you can do some mix-mashup to make sure that there is a rotation of who donates for what months or something. I would like to avoid having more than 3 months server costs available in the Paypal account. One possible way of handling it in the least complicated manner is that I simply just turn off the auto-charge for an occasional month on the Patreon page though, to keep things in balance. Ideas are welcome of course!

Donate the excess to charity? I'm not going to notice the €2 every few months not taken.

[spacetyrantxenu]

Well this is horse shit:

https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/art...5005631963

A quick summary I lifted from a Reddit thread:

TL;DR: Patreon just worsened the efficiency of transferring patrons' money to creators, especially for patrons who donate small amounts to large projects, or creators who create multiple paid posts in a month.
First off, the payment processing fees straight-up increased. Their current (soon-to-be-old) FAQ lists them as:

Stripe charges 1.9% + $0.30 per transaction. PayPal charges 5% + $0.05 per transaction.

The link lists the new fee as

2.9% + $0.35

and they don't even tell you who is doing the payment processing.

Even for a "nice" case of a patron contributing $10/month to a single creator, the money transfer efficiency gets worse. Right now, the patron pays $10, and the creator loses 50 cents to Patreon and 19 cents + 30 cents to Stripe. They get $9.01 out of the $10 the patron was charged, or 90.1% efficiency. Under the new model, that same patron would be charged $10 + 29 cents + 35 cents for payment processing, so $10.64, and the creator receives $9.50 of that, or 89.3% efficiency. There is no breakeven point between the old and new systems because of the increase in payment processing fees.

It's considerably worse if you're contributing $1/mo to 10 different creators. Under the old system, each of those creators loses $0.05 to Patreon, $0.019 to payment processing %ages, and then they split the $0.30 per-transaction fee 10 ways, so each creator gets 90.1 cents for your $1 contribution. Under the new system, you pay the flat transaction fee 10 times, and while the creator gets 95 cents of your contribution, that's only 68.9% of what you paid after fees.

(Fun fact: if all you do is pledge $1 to 1 single project, the math works out such that under the old system, creators get 63% of what you are charged, vs 68% under the new system. But the new system is worse for anyone who supports more than 1 project, or gives more than $2.)

The cherry on top is the new hypocrisy on their Fees FAQ page:

Our mission at Patreon is to get you as much money as possible. It's why we have a fee of just 5% and why we do everything we can to minimize transaction fees.

This is complete B.S. because the new system adds a 35-cent fee per contribution. Not per month, not even per creator, but per contribution. So while today they try to reduce fees that creators pay ("Patreon only charges the patron once for all of the pledges. This reduces processing fees by reducing the total number of transactions, and the lower fee is split among the creators"), they don't seem to show any interest in doing so once those fees are passed along to patrons.

If I continue using Patreon to support projects, I'm going to a makeshift monthly contribution by multiplying my contribution by the typical number of paid posts per month, and capping it at a single contribution, saving myself the extra processing fees.

As for how this impacts us, I think to save ourselves from being ripped off in fees every month we should consider either finding an alternative payment process (sorry, Cal!) or everyone just increase the amount we pay per donation and donate much less frequently so as to avoid paying these idiotic new rates.  I know Cal wanted to avoid having a bunch of money sitting in the account but I think that's less of a problem than having a lot of people effectively donating instead to Patreon's quarterly profit report with each monthly contribution.

As a first pass at offering a solution I'm going to increase my contribution to $5 per donation and hopefully we'll only have to pay quarterly instead of monthly.  The more people who make this change, the less we all get ripped off by the fee increase.

TL;DR - Patreon is changing their fee structure for processing payments.  Under our current small monthly donation system we're going to all end up paying less to Cal to support the server hosting and more to Patreon with each individual payment because Patreon is getting greedy and adding a new fee to every contribution we make.

[Mardoc]

First off, the payment processing fees straight-up increased. Their current (soon-to-be-old) FAQ lists them as:

Stripe charges 1.9% + $0.30 per transaction. PayPal charges 5% + $0.05 per transaction.

The link lists the new fee as

2.9% + $0.35

and they don't even tell you who is doing the payment processing.

When I go to Stripe's website, they list their price as 2.9% + $0.30.  So that's probably the underlying reason for the change in rate.  Hard to blame Patreon for that bit.

The switch to per-creator instead of one monthly transaction is annoying, though. I can't think of a good reason for it, anyway.

[Krill]

I have several months money on a currency card. To save donating to an unworthy cause I would like to just get the money to Cal now. What is the most effective way to transfer that level of cash?

[Caledorn]

I have been looking for good alternatives to Patreon due to the changes. Sadly I can't really find any that gives me a similar option, except for sites that are based on crowd funding for open source projects and/or non-profit causes - and this definitely is profit for the server host company so I don't think we can use those. If anyone knows or can think of any other way, then please do share any thoughts and ideas.

Also, if anyone would like to directly donate to the PayPal account I set up for this specific purpose, I'll send the email you need to use as recipient in a PM.