How to compete with Patreon
I am actually developing a platform to compete with pateon. And the author is quite naive in his complaints.<p>You cannot do business and be anonymous. The tax man would eat you alive. At least outside of USA. You also need a license as sole proprietor or be incorporated as a company in order to make repetitive sales and not one-offs. So again, no anonymity whatsoever.<p>&quot;by works&quot; payment model is illegal. You can receive donations or have subscriptions or pay per view but you cannot &quot;maybe deliver&quot;, &quot;deliver maybe one work, maybe ten&quot;. Again, illegal as fuck.<p>&quot;Non quid pro quo patronage&quot; - again, donations solve this. They are legal and easy without any hustle, as long as the payee is aware what is the purpose of that payment.<p>&quot;api &#x2F; audience relation system&quot; - well, i am trying to run a business, why in the world would i give api access to third parties without being able to monetize it? each api call costs me resources. nothing is free. not to mention that giving access to api might go against my financial business altogether by moving some financial transactions out of my business into foreign business that is monetizing my api.<p>Author is very naive in his complaints in general. The red tape you have to go through these days for a simple(it&#x27;s not a rocket science) website is astronomical. The technological issues(like finding a bank with an actual api that works and does not charge you per payment is close to impossible) too are unending hurdles being thrown at you form left and right and the bigtech-monopolized internet does not want you in it competing with their services or NOT using their services and infrastructure to build yours.  You think streaming video is free? Try finding a place to host the video and send it over the network for amount that your income can cover and allow you still to make a profit. Good luck.<p>Yes, i have solved all these issues. But it is so damn hard, that these complaints don&#x27;t even scratch the surface of how impossible it is to start something serious in this monopolized era of the internet and red tape. You just have no idea. You don&#x27;t.