[pencerw]

(Author of the post here)

I actually kind of agree with this: Patreon is indeed a good way to earn enough money to buy dinner once a week or whatever. I guess it's also good for big time influencer types who are in growth mode and not worrying about their overhead. I just think it's a mediocre solution if what you want is to create a stable, predictable, and mature small business out of your work.

I totally appreciated Patreon when I was starting out; it just really sucked to scale on, and switching to a more legit system was somewhat painful.

[sillysaurusx]

Which system did you switch to?

[executesorder66]

It's mentioned in the middle of the post:

> I moved to a combination of Quickbooks Online ($645/year; note that Intuit is a terrible company) and Squarespace’s ($480/year) recurring products feature.

But the squarespace's recurring products feature seems focused more toward physical products than digital creative artifacts which I mainly associate Patreon with.

[majewsky]

It's always hilarious how broken the American banking system is that you need to pay over $1000/year worth of tooling to receive recurring payments from patrons.

In the EU, you would just open a deposit-only checking account and paste its IBAN (International Bank Account Number) on your website, telling people to setup a recurring payment through their online banking and put their e-mail address or some other ID number in the message field so you can link it back to their account. All that for the price of a checking account, which wouldn't be much more than 10€/month. It's a bit of a barebones system; you wouldn't use it to handle 1000+ subscribers because the linking-back-to-their-account step would be manual. If you're on the scale of 10-100 subscribers with monthly or yearly payments, it works great. Several podcasts I listen to take donations like this.

[baud147258]

Are you sure the bank would accept something like this? Wouldn't they change the account to a business account, to deal with things like taxes?

[krageon]

A business account is 10 euros a month. They don't have anything to do with taxes.

You can have as many deposits as you want as an actual person. Banks do not "change your account" without your intervention and definitely not to a business account, which (legally) needs different information than a personal account would.

[wishiwasoutside]

This is covered in the OP.

[buzzkillington]

>I actually kind of agree with this: Patreon is indeed a good way to earn enough money to buy dinner once a week or whatever. I guess it's also good for big time influencer types who are in growth mode and not worrying about their overhead. I just think it's a mediocre solution if what you want is to create a stable, predictable, and mature small business out of your work.

Pretty much, I was planning a system for bug bounties in 2011, after doing some back of the envelope calculations it turned out you would need 150% overhead for a $10 bounty with human due diligence and using master card/visa/pay pal. Oh and you could never support any project that has anything that the banks don't like, which then included porn, lgbt rights, fair use drm exemptions and a bunch of other stuff that I can't remember any more.

So you either had to convince people to use some alt-coin that wasn't a pyramid scheme, then build an escrow service on top of it, then use that service to fund the bug bounty program. Or you could just do everything terribly and end up with Patreon (which for the above reasons will get even more creator hostile in the coming years).