We’re sorry, and we’re not rolling out the fees change
This is a remarkably direct and appropriate apology, along with an appropriate response, a rare thing indeed.<p>If not for their <i>initial</i> response to the first round of feedback, namely to put a &quot;we&#x27;re still doing it&quot; at the bottom of their original blog post (with completely unreasonable and unjustified explanations for <i>why</i>), I&#x27;d give them full credit for responding appropriately.  As it is, though, at least they fixed this.  They&#x27;re still going to need to deal with the giant pile of patrons they drove off; many people lost a significant fraction of their support because of this change, and that won&#x27;t necessarily come back.<p>Between 1 and 2 years ago, I talked to some folks at Patreon about an unrelated topic (namely, trying to use Patreon for registered charities). They mentioned at that time that they had a change in the works to shift processing fees from creators to patrons, which they said at the time would be &quot;better for creators&quot; for various reasons, but that didn&#x27;t want to talk about the details yet. (Since the issue is now public, I don&#x27;t see any issue with saying that now.) That discussion naturally didn&#x27;t include any information about fee structure or un-aggregation of charges with associated additional fees, e.g. the &quot;$1 costs $1.37&quot; problem, since that wasn&#x27;t the topic; the impression they gave at the time was that the only change was to pass on the (presumably still aggregated) fees to the patrons, which wouldn&#x27;t have been as serious a problem, and wouldn&#x27;t have killed Patreon&#x27;s suitability as a wildly successful microtransaction platform the way this change did. So, they&#x27;ve been thinking about this for a <i>long</i> time, and yet they sprung it on people without warning and without running the <i>full</i> details by anyone.<p>Update: there&#x27;s now a survey from Patreon asking for feedback: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Patreon&#x2F;status&#x2F;941010263385374720" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Patreon&#x2F;status&#x2F;941010263385374720</a>