[jerf]

"There will be alternative solutions that exist after Patreon sunsets, simple solutions."

There are alternate solutions that exist now.

The only truly hard part of creating a Patreon clone is getting the approval to accept credit cards, charge them on a recurring basis, and dealing with the red tape around that. Probably the entire rest of the site is comparable to that in complexity. It's not the legendary "replicate in the weekend" project beloved by HN readers, because that whole credit card thing is nontrivial, but it's no "create a new distributed database backend from scratch and pass the Jepsen suite" either.

[toomuchtodo]

A Stripe token for accepting credit cards isn’t a barrier IMHO.

[jerf]

ISTR hearing that getting approved for point-in-time credit card transactions isn't that difficult, but subscriptions where the user is not directly approving every individual transaction is a higher bar. The potential for chargebacks is much higher in the latter case.