Subscription Billing & iOS prices

Two posts in a row! Don’t worry, this won’t become a habit.

This issue is a little complex and I’m rather late to address it (as usual), so please bare with me.

You might’ve already heard this if you are following other people on Patreon. If you have an iPhone and pledge to Patreon, please read carefully through the information below to ensure you don’t pay 45% extra on your Patreon bill.

My Patreon has switched from Charge Upfront to Subscription Billing today. This change will only affect new subscribers and won’t affect those of you with an ongoing pledge.

Subscription Billing will start from today, the 1st of March. This means that when one joins my Patreon, they will be charged monthly on the same day as they joined. For example, if you join on the 15th of March, the next time you’re charged will be the 15th of April.

Until now, this Patreon was stuck on Charge Upfront, which charged at the 1st of the month regardless of when you joined. In the example above, you’d be charged when joining on March 15th and then on April 1st.

I would have loved to have made this switch sooner, but Patreon only recently started offering this to people like me, who grandfathered into a cheaper Patreon-plan and didn’t want to switch to a more expensive plan with less features just for this feature. Also, I had a bunch of code that uses the Patreon API that I had to fix to be able to make the switch.

If you use an iPhone, avoid pledging through the Patreon app and instead use the website and save an easy 45%.

As you probably already heard, starting November 2024 Apple is going to apply their (appalling) 30% fee to any purchases made on Patreon via the iOS app. Patreon has given creators the option to absorb these costs, but as I'm sure you can imagine a 30% income decrease is not sustainable. I expect many creators will be forced to increase their prices on the iOS app.

Patreon will actually increase these prices by around 45% to ensure a creator still gets the same level of income (see the table in the header image).

Unless you want to suddenly start paying almost 50% more just for the honour of subscribing on the iOS app, you can easily avoid these fees by simply subscribing via either the desktop site or android app instead, as those prices will remain the same.