Patreon is raising its fees for new creators soon
Patreon has announced an update to its pricing, consolidating its Pro and Premium plans into a single offering starting August 5th. The new plan will take 10 percent of creators’ earnings, rather than the current eight percent for Pro and 12 percent for Premium users. That will mean a price increase for many new users, though existing users won’t see any increase, nor will anyone who signs up before the change takes effect. And for access to all the features from the old Premium tier, you’ll need an add-on that tacks an extra three percent onto the default take.
Currently, Patreon’s more expensive Premium plan adds access to coaching and support staff, team accounts, and merchandise options. From August all of those features except merch will be rolled into the new standard plan, fixed at 10 percent of creators’ earnings on the platform. There’ll be an optional add-on for merch, which will add three percent to your overall rate, so in effect there are still two plans available. As before, payment processing, currency conversion, and payout fees will still sit on top of that.
Existing Patreon creators on the Pro tier will continue paying eight percent, as will anyone who launches a Pro creator page on or before August 4th. The Pro plan will be upgraded to include all the same features as the new standard plan.
Creators currently on the 12 percent Premium rate will actually save money, migrating to an 11 percent rate that includes all their current features. They’ll have the option to drop the merch add-on and move to an eight percent rate, matching legacy Pro users.
Patreon’s last pricing update was to sunset its five percent Lite tier in 2023; the Pro and Premium prices were set back in 2019. Explaining this year’s increase, Patreon says in a statement that since 2019 it has “expanded beyond just payments to include media hosting, community, and discovery,” and that the increased prices are in the name of “continuing to invest in the platform creators are building their businesses on.”
Later this summer Patreon will also update pricing for video, which remains in early access despite launching in 2022. Patreon’s video tools launched with 500 free lifetime hours for creators, which was then reduced to 100 hours, but soon eligible creators will instead receive 100 free hours of video per month.