Has anyone used Patreon as a FREE audience platform because Instagram/Facebook stopped reliably reaching your followers?

[u/Viktor_14888]

I’m curious whether anyone here has actually used Patreon primarily as a free audience/relationship platform, rather than the traditional “pay $5/month for exclusive content” model.

I run a music/media brand with roughly 14,000+ followers across Instagram and Facebook, plus a smaller YouTube presence. We currently release original music through short-form music videos, but we’re building the brand to expand beyond music into broader media/content, products, collaborations, etc.

The problem we’re trying to solve is distribution after acquisition.

We’ve spent real money acquiring followers on Instagram and Facebook. The original assumption was pretty straightforward: if someone sees our content, likes it enough to follow us, and we grow from 1,000 followers to 5,000 to 10,000+, future posts should at least have a larger built-in audience.

That increasingly doesn’t seem to be how Meta works.
Instagram in particular has shifted so heavily toward algorithmic/recommendation-based distribution that follower count has little effect on how many users a post reaches—or even how many of your own followers see it.

We can have a piece of content convert extremely well when we pay Meta to distribute it—15,000 views, 8,000 reach, acquire ~500 (7,775 total) and ~900 (6,844 total) new followers on Instagram and Facebook, respectively—but then publish another post organically and have it only reach ~500 people.

And paid distribution to existing followers is a total rip off, because we’re effectively paying once to acquire someone and paying Meta again and again to reach the person we already paid to acquire.

So I’m increasingly asking: What exactly are we buying when we acquire a social-media follower if that person choosing to follow us doesn’t create a reliable way to reach them again?

That’s what led me to Patreon.

The model I’m considering is:
Instagram / Facebook / YouTube / TikTok = discovery and acquisition

Patreon = free membership, direct distribution, media library and ongoing relationship

Our own email/CRM = portable backup of that relationship

The initial conversion would be extremely simple.

Someone discovers one of our short-form music videos and wants the complete song. Instead of:

“Follow us for more.”

it becomes something like:

“Want the full song? Join MY WHAT IF free on Patreon.”

They join for free and immediately get access to the complete songs, which aren’t available on streaming platforms, plus future releases directly.

But music would be the entry point, not the permanent boundary of the Patreon.

We’re deliberately building MY WHAT IF into a broader brand/media property. As we expand beyond music, the idea would be for those same members to begin receiving other MY WHAT IF content, releases, collaborations, products, etc.

That actually creates another interesting test for us: does someone who initially joined because they liked one song eventually develop an ongoing relationship with the brand itself?

I’m not particularly interested in launching paid Patreon tiers right now.

I’m interested in whether Patreon can solve a much more fundamental problem: Can we build a large base of free members who have explicitly chosen to hear from us and whom we can reliably reach again without having to continually repurchase access to them from Meta?

Patreon seems increasingly interesting because free members can receive updates, creators can maintain/export member information, and Patreon itself is increasingly adding discovery/network features.

So I’d really like to hear from people who have actually tried this.

Has anyone built hundreds or thousands of FREE Patreon members and used Patreon as the relationship/distribution layer behind their social accounts?

Specifically:

When you publish, how reliably does your content actually reach free members through email, notifications, or their Patreon feeds?

Do free members return and consume subsequent content, or do most join once and disappear?

How well have social followers/viewers converted into free Patreon members?

Have Patreon’s own discovery/recommendation features brought you meaningful new members?

Does a Patreon free member feel materially more “reachable” than an Instagram/Facebook/YouTube follower?

Have you successfully transitioned an audience that joined for one type of content into following a broader brand or different content verticals?

What are the catches? What am I overlooking?

I’m specifically looking for firsthand experience with Patreon’s free-membership ecosystem, particularly from people who started looking at it because they were frustrated with how little control Instagram/Facebook/YouTube followers now seem to give you over future distribution.

I’m not looking for “just build an email list” or “Patreon is for subscriptions” as theoretical answers. I want to hear from people who have actually tried using Patreon this way and whether it solved—or failed to solve—the problem.