Patreon’s loss is Liberapay’s gain

People vote with their feet over Patreon’s controversial fees.

Nature abhors a vacuum, especially if there’s an open source alternative, and Patreon’s recent travails have shown this. The popular platform that enables people to donate money to content creators recently tried to introduce new fees that would add 35 cents to each pledge. This mean for people pledging $1, the most popular amount, they would now be paying $1.35, and if they were supporting a number of creators those extra costs could soon mount up.

This change caused an outcry among supports and creators, who worried that the extra fees could result in less donations. Thankfully, there were alternatives, with free and open source platforms such as Liberapay ( https://liberapay.com) and BountySource ( https://salt.bountysource.com) gaining more attention from disgruntled Patreon 5) https://blog.patreon.com/not-rolling-out-fees-change/ users, with many creators suggesting their donors use Liberapay instead.

Patreon claimed it was making the change so creators could keep a larger percentage of its donations, but many people accused it of trying to increase its profits. Soon Patreon was forced to back-track. In a blog ( http://bit.ly/patreon-fees

5) post by Jack Conte, the co-founder of Patreon, announced that, “We’ve heard you loud and clear. We’re not going to roll out the changes to our payments system that we announced last week.”

The blog title was “We messed up. We’re sorry, and we’re not rolling out the fees change”, and in it Jack recognised that Patreon had lost the trust of its users, and that it was working to fix things. However, for many people who have already moved to Liberapay, it was too late.