Complaining that their service is terrible while also complaining that they are trying to generate more money to further invest in that service....riiiighhht!
back
4 comments
It isn't linear, they could have spent less to have a more usable service. Just look at the self inflicted mess that is AirBNB, the front end basically crashes if you type too fast on a slow connection.
The complaint is about forced inefficiencies that Patreon then foists onto its customers. They are balancing their books by upping their fees, not streamlining their business and they can only do this (in the short term) because they have a fairly captive audience.
We are about to see a whole sea of Patreon competitors.
We are about to see a whole sea of Patreon competitors.
I really hope so! I had been using Patreon as a "poor man's microtransactions" with $1 subscriptions (contingent on actually producing content, if possible) on something like 40 creators. I moved over to SubscribeStar, but they don't have the default $1 option.
The default cost of a transaction is typically ~$.30 cents. Thats just payment processing. Not alot of margin there.
The default cost of a transaction is typically ~$.30 cents. Thats just payment processing. Not alot of margin there.
A web app could aggregate charges to me, and aggregate payments out to content creators. Obviously. That's what Patreon was doing. Others could do it too. (If the allegations of collusion with payment processing are true, this would explain why this isn't done more.)
He has $40 subscriptions and presumably none of the creators only have his $1 subscription. At no point are they actually eating the fixed cost on a $1 transaction.
Actually, while Patreon did such aggregation, SubscribeStar seems to do each transaction individually. I wonder if they aren't over a barrel because insiders in the payment processing industry are locking them out.
They have a staff of 90 engineers already out of an overall headcount of ~300. Performantly serving text and images to a userbase of 2 million users/month is not a wild expectation. it's barely even table stakes. And if you fail at that, despite employing 90 engineers, why should anyone trust you when you claim that taking more money out of their pockets will somehow turn that around?
Poorly spending money is not a good justification for getting more money.
They actually make it worse with every revision. This isn't a matter of not having enough money. Even their badge to put on websites blasts megabytes of analytics script at you to display a tiny image.