Alternatives to Patreon

I'm sorry, all.  I know you're probably annoyed and tired of all these posts related to the fee changes of Patreon.  It's important to me because I feel it's unfair that you're now carrying the burden. But also, I pushed and pushed and PUSHED to get people willing to sub at $1 and now they're the ones being most impacted by this.  I have about 25 patrons that sub at $3 and below. I've already lost almost $50 in subs, so that could easily become $75 if a significant number of people drop. That's a lot of money. That's a fuckton of money for me.

For the record, just thinking about this stuff constantly has made it difficult to do my other work, like right now I have severe artist's block trying to work on Kaerwyn - for what is a very important page.

In my poll, several of you said you're interested, but want more information. So let me lay out what I've been thinking about for the past several days.

Please feel free to reply with your thoughts.

Option #1: I create my own subscription/donation methods

My Site:

I spent all weekend looking at various Content Management Systems that have a paywall/subscription addon.  Right now I'm seriously looking into Joomla with an addon that costs me a flat $30 for the software but allows you to subscribe using Paypal or Stripe. I would not have your payment information *at all*, all of your transactions would go through Paypal or Stripe, period.  (Stripe is what Patreon uses as well, just in case you didn't know).  I was also looking into Drupal that has another addon that's about $110/month and another that was $40/month. They all offer various things that makes me keep them in mind despite the higher cost. For the record, Patreon costs me almost $100 a month currently.

Now this would be my own personal site, it would not be connected to anyone else. Though Shadowsmyst (Creator of the Shifters webcomic) and I have talked about sharing a site so that we can provide content for all of our users (We tend to share userbases as well).  We're still looking into if this is plausible.

Site Security is a real concern of mine, as CMS's are notorious for being hack targets, but Joomla has a pretty good record and they have auto-updates now.  I've also got one running using SSL (Secure Socket Layer) as well.  This is what turns http into https in your URL bar. This adds an extra level of security.

I would like to make it so that if the site gets hacked, then the only thing lost will be email addresses and maybe passwords. I know this sounds dire, but I'm always thinking of "when, not if" when it comes to this stuff, so I want to mitigate as much damage as possible.  The likelihood of getting hacked is pretty low, but it exists.

A mailing list:

I've been thinking about this one very seriously for my $3 and under patrons. You get screwed the most, and you're the most likely to drop support.  So I've been thinking about setting up some subscriptions for Paypal but also donations via Ko-Fi (uses Paypal for one time payments) and Google Wallet (Not sure if they have a subscription method).

I would add you folks to the mailing list and you'd get your early arrival comics delivered to you that way.  I'd have to do this manually so, this adds more of a timesink, but I think it's worth it in the end until we can get an alternative.

If you use this to donate more than the $5 tier, I'm not sure how to get the special tier information to you, other than making a mailing list per tier? That might be difficult. This option is mostly for those donating under $5 who are impacted the most.

Option #2. Patreon Alternatives

Commiss.io:https://commiss.io/ 

Currently, there aren't really any good alternatives to Patreon.  However, I have been speaking with Commiss.io's guys in their discord chat (Along with several others) offering advice on a subscription model like Patreon's.  Commiss.io is highly regarded among artists getting commissions, so having them create a Patreon alternative is VERY exciting.  I have told them all of my gripes with Patreon: The fees, Allowing you to donate more than one month at a time for your selected tier, Lack of static pages for things like information and  downloads, gallery for special images, etc. We've made a ton of suggestions and they'e looking into setting this up, very seriously. Unfortunately we don't know when. But I am hoping that they will hit Patreon where Patreon has its strongest advantage: Get lots of artists on board and you can support all of them on one platform.

Drip:https://d.rip

Drip is Kickstarter's version of Patreon. I have signed up for their waiting list, but currently it's in invite only beta.  They expect it to be open sometime early next year.  I'm watching this one, but currently Commiss.io is my preferred alternative.

This is all the information I have to give right now. I will be playing around with Joomla and other CMS's for my own site in the coming weeks. I will not have anything available before these damn fees hit.  If you guys are interested in the mailing list option, please let me know so I can set up the appropriate paypal buttons.