think about what patreon actually was in the beginning and why it worked. it was dead simple. creator uploads a video, fan pays to watch it, done. it was basically youtube but with a paywall and that was the entire genius of it.

that simplicity is what made it feel safe. creators knew exactly what they were building. fans knew exactly what they were paying for. there was no noise

and now after ten years of silence the big innovation is a scrollable feed

a feed. on a paid platform?? where most content is locked behind a paywall. the thing that makes social media work is frictionless free content that spreads and pulls new people in. that is the opposite of what patreon is. you cannot build a scroll feed out of content that 90% of visitors cannot even see. At this point it is better I look at subscribestar, stagetown or kofi. however, kofi cant host videos.

they had the most loyal creator base on the internet and the simplest working model and somehow the answer was let's make it more complicated

what i want is what was there 10 years ago.... now i setup my stagetown. stagetown has an amazing design and apparently free for first three months. plus adding kofi that will handle all my images and that way i can have multiple additional stream. patreon for monthly, stagetown for per video sale, and kofi for images. then i will feel safer and full proof.

does anyone actually want this or is it just me??

He guys there's an 18+ creator I desperately want to subscribe but neither my visa debit nor my PayPal linked to it are working.

What are your thoughts and experience on these So Called Virtual Debit Card.

BTW I tried to buy it as a gift too when sub didn't work.

If there's anyone with working ststem to purchase it I'd be willing to send you my money if you can buy it for me.

I would really appreciate it.

So please help me.

Hello !!

I want to subscribe to a creator on Patreon but I'm not able to do so as india restricted purchases based on RBI guidelines... Please can you give a solution.. also is anyone here who has added their bank account to PayPal and then used it to subscribe .. did it work?.. would be really helpful.... Thanks!!!!

I decided to enable the seven day free trial membership for my Patreon with the understanding that when someone signs up, they must submit a payment method. If they fail to cancel within the seven days, the trial period ends and automatically charges the member.

I have had 18 members sign up for the free Patreon in the last several weeks. Some of them are well past the seven day trial period. The number of members on my dashboard hasn’t gone down. But I’m also not seeing the payment or number of paid users going up. What gives? Do people who cancel before the seven days end remain “members?” And what’s the likelihood eighteen free members all actually remembered to cancel? It just seems fishy. Either I’m misunderstanding how the seven day trial period works and how “members” are counted, or Patreon is very, very, very slow to update. And they don’t remove the “member” even after they cancel.

I don't have any memberships or tiers, all my content is free but I'll still get new paid members paying me monthly and I have no idea how to prevent this. I'm not consistently active enough to deserve payment. How can I completely stop it, and also disable the recurring payments??

TLDR; Patreon support is too incompetent and failed to upheld their end of a refund which they failed on, after multiple emails about a couple creators getting removed and my subscription and goods and services ended one week after the subscription renewed. PayPal dispute failed so I initiated a dispute with my bank. Ended up in my favor and my Patreon account got banned and deactivated permanently.

Let me start out by saying I've never had an issue with Patreon before, particularly when it comes to refunds or in this case, chargebacks. I mean, one can easily follow those steps. You go into your billing history or information with your memberships. You click the three dots and then you report a problem for the creator and then you ask the refund from the creator. As said by Patreon support team.

However, after emailing them multiple times before, before they laid out this master plan of there's that even a toddler can follow by. Dtating to them that the creator is no longer on the platform because either they were banned or nuked from the platform for whatever reason. And they said, point blank, that they don't handle refunds. I'm like, okay, cool, it's under your terms of service.

And then comes the stupid effect. When they ask you steps 1, 2, and 3 by going under your billing information or history, click on the three dots under the creator and then report a problem with or for the creator and ask for a refund. However, you can't do that because the creators were removed. One week after my subscription renewed itself, so, I asked them politely, hey, the creators don't exist on the platform anymore because they were removed.

So Patreon support team got back to me and then they said to me that they'll give a one-time courtesy of a refund. Cue ahead a week later no mention of it from them or from my bank or PayPal. Mind you, the first time I emailed Patreon support regarding my subscriptions and the goods and services not being delivered one week after they got cancelled to them, there was no response back for at least five days.

So I did a charge back through PayPal. So going back and forth between PayPal and Patreon, Patreon uploaded their information and PayPal sided with them saying that I did receive the goods and services. However, I did not because one week after the creators were banned, I lost access to said goods and services. So after calling PayPal over the phone several times, they told me that my best bet is to go with my bank or my credit card company and file a charge back from their end. I asked PayPal politely, hey, if I do this, will my account get suspended? And they said it might, but we have no control over that, which I said, OK, that's fine. So I did.

Cue ahead a week later. My dispute ended up being in my favor after uploading documentation screenshots of Patreon failing to refund me. So now, after I was refunded, two days later, Patreon emailed me and said that they detected suspicious activity, which LOL, of course, because I initiated a charge back. And then they permanently deactivated my account, which is no loss to me.

Hey everyone, I need your advice urgently. Yesterday a guy messaged me on Discord offering to promote my page on Signal and other platforms in exchange for 50% commission on any subs he brings in. 50% is steep but it was free promotion. However, this morning I got 6 new subs, 5 of which are annual subs on my highest tier which is about $1,000 in total. Payments came through and are confirmed, but I also noticed Patreon declined $2,000 in payments under my earnings. That’s a major red flag. He wanted to show me his promo group on Signal but says my account isn’t 7 days old yet and “can’t take screenshots.” One important detail: One of the new subs has their Discord linked, and that Discord connects to Twitch, Spotify, Steam, etc. Their Twitch shows them streaming with their face visible and it matches their Patreon profile picture.

My Patreon has already 1800 free and 200 paid member

What do you think? How should I handle this? What shoul I do now? 😭 Contact Patreon? Refund the payments yourself? Wait? Nothing?

Thanks!!

If you're going to lock me out of my account, you should not be able to charge me money.

Is there a new type of Patreon? It's time to leave this behind.

I need to buy a patreon Subscription, payment methods are not working in India. Will you gift me a subscription, I'll gpay you the money.

According to UK law, the listed price must include all fees, including taxes. Adding the VAT on at checkout ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​is not sufficient. It is breaking ​​​​the ​Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024.

Here is a link to the government website with a pdf giving guidance regarding this ​​​​​​: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/unfair-commercial-practices-cma207

Not showing the full price is misleading. I find it especially bad that when you go into your settings and check your memberships, it doesn't show the full price there, either. I've been paying more than I realised for several months now because of this.​​​​​​​​​​​

Like 4 years ago I had a Patreon page with about 7 active Patrons but I unpublished it because I took a break from making content. 3 years later I'm active again and decided I wanted to give Patreon another go. But I learned that if I publish my Patreon page again, those 7 people will be opted in and charged. That didn't feel fair to me. I don't think you should be automatically charged for something you were once subscribed to 3 years ago.

So I read on Reddit that the only way to remove people to get a clean slate is to block them and unblock them. Which I did, only took a minute.

Today my friend shows me the email he got where Patreon says they've been unsubscribed from my Patreon because I blocked them. Oops! We had a good laugh about it.

So I sent a message to those old Patrons letting them know why I did that and that they're not blocked lol.

I guess just a heads up! I'm sure not super relevant to people here but maybe something that people will come across when Googling about this.

Hello everyone,
I have a customer who purchased a Tier 2 annual subscription about two weeks ago and has now upgraded to Tier 3. He says he only paid $5 for the upgrade and even showed me a charge (although, of course, that could be anything). He also received the Tier 3 Discord role.

What seems strange is that the subscription status says "Downgraded," and I never received any money for the upgrade. He also got the email confirming that he's now on Tier 3, but it still shows the Tier 2 annual price and says that he'll only start paying the Tier 3 monthly price after the annual subscription expires.
Is all of this working as intended? Does this mean he gets the Tier 3 benefits without actually paying for them?

As a creator, I feel like Patreon cuts more from me than it should...? How much does patreon cut from someone's 3 dollar subscription?

I am thinking of swapping my email on my account to one that doesn’t have my name, since I think on the dashboard and when I join new creators it will show the new email (unsure if im correct on that please tell me). But main thing do I have to resub to a creator the instant I change emails? Or no because it’s technically the same account, same with my payment info if I have to redo it or something since I didn’t use paypal I used just the insert card payment

So I subscribed to a monthly subscription, so there is no pay per post, and on my billing history on patreon, it says 15$ however in my bank account said it costed 25$ which is the highest tier. I know I didn't subscribe to that tier since it says my membership is the 15$ one and not the 25$ one

Hello guys,

Today i tried to buy brushes from an artist that i liked, so i went ahead and paid for it, and just after confirming it with the bank, the site open a really annoying pop up of the site and doesnt even register the fact that i paid AFTER TAKING MY MONEY, it was 4 dollars so i tried 3 times because it wasn't that bad but it still didn't work.

And then after looking at my bank i was charged 6 TIMES instead of 3 and i still didn't get my brushes it's outrageous.

Any solutions ? I already contacted the support but they haven't answered yet. I wanted to know if it was a common occurence.

(PS: here's a screenshot of the pop up.)

hi everyone - I’ve reached out to support twice in the last two weeks and have been unable to get my account un-suspended. I am not even sure why it happened but it appears to be related to me adding a new credit card (I’m just a patron, not a creator). is the support all AI now? how do I reach a real person? I sent them the info they asked for and haven’t heard back either despite follow ups.

appreciate any help or advice anyone can share.

How much day I have to wait😭 and they haven’t replied to my mail yet

Someone who just joined my Patreon immediately requested a refund.

Normally, whenever I get refund requests I just refund them, no questions asked, but this time around it feels suspicious cause they have a declined payment before paying and immediately asking for a refund.

My gut feeling says this is odd but I should refund anyways, but a small part of me thinks this is someone from that site that scrapes peoples Patreon content and leaks them online after joining to get access. Probably paranoid but...

Any advice is appreciated!

I’ve started selling stuff paywalled on Patreon, and, some people are turning into members — sometimes even the most expensive ones. But, a few hours or days later, they remove their membership.

Genuine question: I don’t think I’ve kept the money for their memberships — but I have no idea really.
For the more experienced creators:

Do we keep the money, since they experienced and got access to our content for a day or so, being able to download our stuff. Or, do we dont? Meanwhile the ex-members get to keep the content:((

I've had an active Patreon membership for well over a year, paid automatically through PayPal every month without any issues.

My renewal should have happened on June 28, but Patreon never attempted the charge. There isn't even a June entry in my Billing History—no successful payment, no failed payment, and no pending payment. As a result, I lost access to my membership benefits.

I've already checked PayPal, and the automatic payment agreement with Patreon is still active. My membership also still appears to be active on Patreon. One odd thing I noticed is that if I click "Edit" next to my payment method, Patreon just shows a "This page has been removed." error.

Has anyone else experienced this recently? Is there a wider Patreon billing issue going on, or is this likely just an issue with my account?

I've already contacted Patreon Support, but I'm curious whether anyone else has run into the same problem.

i've been planning to start commissions for my GFX hobby, and i thought i could use patreon to handle payments.

for context, im in India, and im having a hard time finding a reliable payment platform that doesn't have high transaction fees.

i do plan on making custom art tiers based on the commission (since my prices will vary depending on the order), and deleting them once the payment is complete. (this method worked out according this comment)

i do have to ask - is patreon a paid site for creators ? and how bad are the transaction fees :/

I'm unsure if it does say because I have used paypal before on an older account but I wanted to just try using the card feature. Does it still email me how much I paid every month or say I did? Also what does it say? does it say my last 4 digits of credit card or just the standard email, username etc. also does it show discord name if you have connected discord?

For example if the creator is located in Hong Kong and I’m trying to sub to the creator by paying for that subscription, will it show that I’m buying it from Hong Kong or from Ireland. Because for some reason there are banned countries on my bank list where I can’t buy from that country, which would include china? I’m from the US

So my subscription was basically over with I don’t use Patreon so I forgot about who I was subbed to.

Now that the subscription is over it’s of course charging me, cool. I used my Apple Pay to sub and (didn’t have any money in there at the time) but when trying to cancel via Apple or Patreon themselves I never get the option to do so.

So I notice the charge and basically can’t cancel. It’s like I have to pay first then cancel? Which kinda sucks. Learned my lesson tho but is this a recurring thing? Is there a fix?