This post is mostly just me thinking about loud about how building a Patreon alternative would worth. BUCKLE UP, BUDDIES.
Patreon has issues for a lot of people because it’s really geared for large creators, especially Youtubers. This is fine! But it leaves a lot of people out in the cold who have smaller fanbases, work in fields that don’t release output as consistently (hi, novel authors!), etc. Patreon is also redonkulously squeamish about adult content, making it difficult to discover (by unlisting the page) at best, which totally hoses another huge set of creatives.
There are a couple of alternatives out there, but they have their own issues. Liberapay, for example, doesn’t allow for locked posts due to the nature of being a nonprofit. Drip is apparently foundering right now, and no one’s really sure how that’s going to turn out.
So here’s the thoughts I’ve got so far on building an alternative:
- Same base model as Patreon or Liberapay: subscriptions per month to various creators, charge all at once at the end of the month to minimize transaction fees on the gathering-from-donors end.
- Use a pre-existing payment processor like Stripe or Paypal, let users choose which one they want to use. Provide at least two options so the incident that happened with Liberapay (where their payment processor pulled out suddenly and left them scrambling) doesn’t happen.
- Allow adult content. Sex work is real work, and it’s getting harder and harder to find ways to get properly paid for it.
- Along that axis, perhaps introduce a middle currency to get around the whole “directly buying adult content” thing that payment processors are so skittish about. A really good example of this is Audible. Audiobooks have high market prices because they need to be sold to libraries and institutions, but unlike print books with library bindings you can’t make a special version of the audiobook. So audiobook producers charge the library/institution price. What Audible does is they sell you a token, which costs significantly less than the cover price, and then you exchange that token for the audiobook. Publishers can keep their prices where they need to be for libraries/institutions, consumers can get audiobooks at reasonable rates, everyone wins (unless you’re like me and don’t like Amazon, but that’s a whole other post).
- This would also allow users to “load up” their account ahead of time, if they wanted. So either they could pledge 20 tokens per month to various projects, get charged 20 bucks, which auto-buys tokens, which are then distributed to projects a couple days later or whatever and cashed out by the creators. (Maybe they could set it to auto-cash out on a certain date each month? Hrm.) Or you could buy, like, 100 tokens ahead of time and have those distribute 20 at a time for five months, and then reload your account again later on. This also avoids having to hold onto people’s money directly.
- There’s still not a great way here to minimize transaction fees coming and going, although allowing creators to wait to cash out their tokens might let them wait to get a bigger pile of money together first and thus minimize the fees. Same with buying large amounts of tokens all at once.
- One thought here is to take the transaction fees out up front. Maybe $20 gets you 18 tokens instead of 20, with the understanding that this way creators will actually get your full dollar and the company/provider/whatever-we-are-here is covering the fees for them.
- Adam Rakunas also mentioned the idea of such a project being a creator-owned co-op, which I really like. It might also let creators with bigger pull-ins per month cover the transaction fees of smaller creators. Maybe you could balance it so everyone puts in a percent of their money/month and that covers everyone’s transaction fees? But somehow make that percent smaller than the fees? Hrm. Or make it a little higher for high-donation-receiving accounts, so it’s not regressive? Also this might allow to take the leftover overflow and use it for things like funding servers.
- Keep features like locked posts and other functionality that current Patreon users depend on.
- LET’S FEDERATE IT wait no, I don’t think that actually works here?
- I’m stuck on how to do verification of projects? Liberapay talks about it a lot over on their site as a way of preventing fraud, which is an important thing to think about! But their method requires an account on another site, which might be not-so-great for marginalized creators who have a hard time being on other social media sites.
- Strong terms of service and moderation to keep Nazis and other hate groups off the site.
So that’s where I’m at right now. I don’t really have the existing front-end or back-end skills for this, but I’d be more than willing to learn for such an important project. And definitely, definitely have other people check my work, obviously. Security and reliability would be of the utmost importance.
Maybe I’ll find a way to do it! Maybe y’all have awesome ideas/critiques/etc you want to share! Maybe this’ll be the end of it! But I wanted to get these thoughts out there and see what people think, and to get them down for my own use later on. I think there’s an interesting opportunity here for us all to help each other, the trick will be figuring out just how feasible it is.
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