On Patreon's iOS Changes

Hello again!

I'm still not quite back up to returning this newsletter to its regular format – hopefully next week – but I thought I'd send something out about the changes at Patreon that were announced a while back but came into full effect a few days ago, not so much for myself but as a public service for other creators.

Many of you, I believe, back me on Patreon (thank you!), so some of you will have seen the post I did about this when it was first announced. But many will have missed it, so I thought I'd post this here now it's happened.

Patreon have, for a while, had an app as well as a website. It is, from what I can tell, a rather useless one (certainly a number of the DMs I get are from people who don't know how to find stuff in the app which seems straightforward on the website), but they do have one. And late last year Apple told them that their app would have to start working on the same terms as any other app which takes payments and is accessed through the Apple app store.

That means that for every transaction made through the app, Apple will now take thirty percent of the money off the top. They will also hold the money for seventy-five days before releasing it to Patreon, who in turn release it to their creators.

That means that if you sign up for someone's Patreon (mine or anyone else's) through the Patreon app on the mobile device, or if you change Patreon tiers using that device, Apple will take thirty percent off the top for doing nothing at all. If you sign up for my $1 a month tier, through the iPhone/iPad app, you'll be paying $1.30 a month, thirty cents of which will go to Apple -- and all of which will be held for seventy-five days before being passed on. If you suddenly won the lottery and upgraded and decided to give me $20 a month, your generosity to me would also include you being generous to Apple and giving them $6 every month if you did the upgrade through the Apple app rather than through the website.

(And yes, this means that many of your other purchases or gifts through other apps on your Apple device have had a similar surcharge.)

Now, of course that's up to you – maybe like Ray in Achewood you like their product and want them to have a little walking-around money. But I think I can speak for every creator on Patreon when I say we would all rather that money go to us than to Apple, and that we can probably make better use of it. (Apple had a revenue of $391.04 billion last year – I'm not saying what I made, but it may shock some of you who envy the glamorous lifestyle of the self-published podcaster and freelance writer when I say it wasn't even one billion dollars...)

And yes, it does seem more than a little on the nose that this Apple Tariff is coming in at precisely the same time that the US Government has decided to do exactly the same thing on a much bigger scale. Does anyone else remember that long-ago time when the Republican Party were the party of free trade and the Internet was meant to make things cheaper by cutting out the middleman?

Now, so far this hasn't hit me particularly badly, because most of my audience tend to use the website (one of the advantages of having the particular demographics I have). I've lost less than 1% of my monthly income to this, which is a loss I can afford to take – though obviously I'd rather I have it than Apple have it, and it's likely to increase as people's annual subscriptions that they paid for through the app renew. But I've seen other people saying they've lost almost a third of their income because it's going to Apple instead – and those people tend to be making rather less money from their Patreons than I am (I've been very lucky indeed in having very generous and supportive listeners on the whole).

Again, at the moment this only applies to financial transactions through the iOS app (though I'm absolutely sure that Google will insist on the same for the Android app sooner rather than later). If you're using the iPhone or iPad just to browse Patreon and not subscribing or changing tiers through it, you're fine and not paying an Apple surcharge. So long as you remember to do anything which involves money through a web browser rather than through the app, you're not paying extra and the people you support aren't losing out.

But if you have in the past subscribed to any Patreons through the iOS app, you should take the time before your next payment is due to cancel the subscription and then resubscribe using a web browser.

And this last part I am explicitly not saying for me, because I have so far not been hit badly by this and I am doing very well; but if you're subscribed to any other creators on Patreon and you can afford it, consider upping your subscription to the next tier, or maybe adding a subscription to someone you've always meant to subscribe to but haven't yet – through a web browser, not the iOS app, of course. A lot of those people are seeing massive cuts to their income at the same time as they're also seeing massive cost-of-living increases thanks to the tariffs, and that's not a great combination, and so they would probably appreciate the extra support.

(Obviously "if you can afford it" is a big "if" for everyone right now...).

Patreon has been a literal life-saver for me – it has made the difference between me working in day jobs that literally came close to killing me, and me making a very comfortable income doing work I love – and for all the frustrations I've had with stupid decisions it's made over the years, this one is not its fault – it's Apple abusing its monopoly position. It's a lifesaver for many other people too, and many of those people have less of a margin than I do. Be sure that if you're supporting those people, you're actually supporting them, and not just giving Apple walking-around money.

Until next time...