Patreon apologizes for ‘overstepping’ on fees that everyone hated

After a lot of backlash from creators and patrons, Patreon has announced that it will no longer be implementing its new fee structure. It would have gone into effect on December 18.

The update would have shifted processing fees from the creators to the people who support them with monthly pledges, adding an extra 2.9 percent and $0.35 charge to each donation. In the current system, Patreon takes a 5 percent cut of donations and creators have to pay anywhere from 2 percent to 10 percent in transaction fees. The membership platform has said that it wanted to roll out a new system so that creators could reliably take home 95 percent of their pledges and no longer have to deal with unpredictable additional transaction costs.

In a blogpost, Patreon CEO Jack Conte apologized for “overstepping” into the creator-patron relationship. He acknowledged the concerns that the new fee structure would impact folks who donate $1 or $2 on lower tiers the most.

“We still have to fix the problems that those changes addressed, but we’re going to fix them in a different way, and we’re going to work with you to come up with the specifics, as we should have done the first time around,” said Conte.

Still, the damage may already be done. Since the update was announced last week, creators have posted screenshots of patrons unsubscribing due to the new fees. It remains to be seen if the change of plans will encourage them to resubscribe.