Hey, so, Patreon is lying to you about Apple forcing their hand.
Patreon is getting rid of 1st-of-the-month/per-creation billing, claiming a new decision by Apple has forced their hand. This will hurt a lot of creatives, and their excuse is bullshit. Allow me to explain.
In 2018, Patreon tried to impose a new ill-considered fee structure on everyone that would have cost creators a lot of smaller pledges. They ended up apologizing for this profusely; they have now deleted this apology from their website and unfortunately I was unable to find it on the Internet Archive. This was shameful, but to their credit they backed off quickly when things got ugly.
Back in 2021, Patreon discussed plans to force all creators into a rolling bill structure and get rid of first-of-the-month/pay-up-front billing. The community once again very decisively shouted them down, and they had to walk it back again. This whole fiasco damaged the already shaky trust between Patreon creators and staff.
This week, Patreon announced that, along with extra fees, Apple's policies were supposedly forcing them to move everyone over to the rolling fee structure that they first tried to get us to agree to in 2021. Patreon will tell you they are not happy about this. As a person who spent a long time watching Patreon make terrible decisions, I can tell you-- they are probably very happy about this, because it's exactly the smokescreen they needed to do what they've been trying to do for years, which is pull ALL Patreon creators away from 1st-of-the-month and per-creation billing.
The spin in the news I've seen so far is "Apple bullies Patreon, boo hoo hoo poor Patreon". This is very obviously not what's happening. Mind you: Apple does suck, and they are doing something bad here. Fuck apple. But Patreon and Apple are BOTH the asshole in this situation; Everyone Sucks Here. Patreon has options: they can make the iOS app a reader app and do billing through the browser to avoid the restrictions and the extra fees (Netflix and Amazon, notably, both do this), or they can allow creators to opt-out of iOS billing if they want to use billing models that don't work with it.
It seems most likely to me that the Apple situation is a real fire that Patreon has chosen to use as a convenient smokescreen to do what they've been wanting to do since at least 2021, and maybe since 2018.
They have a feedback form specifically about this.
They also have a creator discord.
And they have lots of social media pages where they probably really, really hope that this doesn't blow up again, because they never learn. The incidents I've described here aren't the only two other times Patreon has pissed off their creators. They know if they don't contain the noise it'll be harder to get away with it, so make some noise. They've done a lot of work to spin this cleverly so you'll have sympathy for them and they won't get the kind of backlash they know they deserve.
Please don't misuse these links and make threats or spam or something. All you have to do is give well-reasoned feedback. Patreon hates feedback. Make sure they get a nice heaping helping of their least favorite vegetable.
