Why do you think it's bollocks? It makes perfect sense. A transaction fee + % is common with payment processors. Couple that with new rules coming down the pipeline (as well as common sense when it comes to processing transactions for other people), nothing about the pricing is unreasonable. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The entire point of Patreon is to spread the transaction fee across the people you are backing at $1/month or $1/post.
If they had this 2.9%+$0.35 fee get charged when they charge my card, I would be fine with it. Its the per creator charging of it that is ridiculous. Most of the people I back is at the $1 level, which would be not viable with the new fee.
There is no good reason for this, as even paying to the creator should be lump sum via ACH, rather than hundreds of $1 transactions. ACH (a electronic check system in the us) charges a very minimal amount for a connection to the network to cover admin costs. Current fees[0] are $264/yr+$0.000185/transaction. Even with paying ACH fees for both ends (creator and the patreon) and refusing to aggregate, ACH fees are still a rounding error.
What they should be doing is offering you to pay via ACH to reduce fees so the creators can actually get a bigger share of the $1 you spend.
> The entire point of Patreon is to spread the transaction fee across the people you are backing at $1/month or $1/post.
That's decidedly false. The entire point of Patreon is to support creators, and to make it easy for creators to get that support.
> There is no good reason for this,
There are. Legal reasons. Banking reason. Simply put, lumping together transactions is dangerous. Dangerous for creators, dangerous for patreons, and dangerous for customers. I'm surprised they did it this long.
> as even paying to the creator should be lump sum via ACH,
What does this have to do with the majority of people paying via CC?
> There are. Legal reasons. Banking reason. Simply put, lumping together transactions is dangerous. Dangerous for creators, dangerous for patreons, and dangerous for customers.
You still keep records of who paid who (eg: This dollar in creator X's account came from backer Y), they are "lumped" as far as the CC processor is concerned so you don't have to pay that per-transaction fee for each creator backed. Basically, as long as the transactions are internal to Patreon, the transaction fees should be inline with the cost of a few rows in a database.
> What does this have to do with the majority of people paying via CC?
If they really were interested in reducing fees, they would let people pay via ACH, which it currently does not look like they do.
They're charging 0.35 for moving some balance from one big transaction they charged me into accounts of the people I support. It's basically charging for an atomic move.
You seem to assume that each pledge is a separate transaction. But the entire advantage of patreon over doing pledges directly is that all my pledges are one transaction with them, and all pledges someone receives are one transaction. Sure, charge me 0.35+small % once a month as transaction fee.
> You seem to assume that each pledge is a separate transaction.
Incorrect. I know how Patreon used to work before this announcement. My understanding is they are splitting it up into separate transactions, which makes sense if you understand how credit card processing, monetary transactions, and all the legal ramifications around them operate.
What I do hear is a lot of people who haven't worked in the CC industry making baseless assumptions about how all this works.
PayPay, Google Wallet, and many other systems allows you to move money within the system for free. Only paying a fee when money comes in or out of the system.
What most of us are unhappy with this that they plan to split the pledges into one transaction per pledge.
