There is one pretty big problem with using patreon as their fundraising platform: It eats a little less than 8% of the money you put in. That is money simply lost from the community. This makes patreon an unacceptable medium for transactions.
Now, about 3% of that is from credit card fees. Are there alternatives to that? I am unsure how much the one time donation takes, but I suspect it is only the credit card fees. We’re losing 5% to the convenience of not pressing a button to donate every month.
As of this writing they’re making $5,464/month. I presume that’s pre-fee. I’ll also assume everyone actually pays every month.
They lose $163/month to the credit card fees, and from the remaining another $265/month for a total of $428/month lost all due to the medium of monetary transfer.
That’s about half of what I spend each month to live, so the inefficiency here is costing us 50% of one person’s living situation. Minimum wage is about $8/hour. So a more concrete measure is we’re losing ~60 minimum wage hours a month. We should be willing to pay someone that much to fix this transaction problem.
And that’s just for this one project.
I presume they’re using patreon because people know it and are willing to use it, but this is a coordination problem, and a rather serious one at that should this medium become more popular.
This is certainly worth considering. But in counterpoint – building an alternative platform (one that *in particular* solves the problem of ‘people can donate each month without having to pay attention _and_ people know is reasonably bug free and works smoothly’) is a nontrivial undertaking.
This isn’t to say it’s not worth it, but it actually matters how much time it’d take. If something quick can be thrown together in 5-10 hours, it’s definitely worth it (each hour providing about $500 worth of value for one year of REACH. If it’s 40 hours, probably still worth it but less overwhelmingly so.
I think doing this well enough to succeed not just for REACH but also for all analogous projects in the future would require not just a bare-bones working project, but an actual quality platform that would end up being more like “build a competitor for Patreon” than anything quick (which would most likely end up charging as well).
I do agree someone should look into this but I’m not as confident it’ll turn out to be a quick project.
I will say that if anyone wants to build this, I recommend using Plaid (a service partnered with stripe) which uses ACH payments instead of credit cards, for much smaller fees (at least for larger donations).
There is one pretty big problem with using patreon as their fundraising platform: It eats a little less than 8% of the money you put in. That is money simply lost from the community. This makes patreon an unacceptable medium for transactions.
Now, about 3% of that is from credit card fees. Are there alternatives to that? I am unsure how much the one time donation takes, but I suspect it is only the credit card fees. We’re losing 5% to the convenience of not pressing a button to donate every month.
As of this writing they’re making $5,464/month. I presume that’s pre-fee. I’ll also assume everyone actually pays every month.
They lose $163/month to the credit card fees, and from the remaining another $265/month for a total of $428/month lost all due to the medium of monetary transfer.
That’s about half of what I spend each month to live, so the inefficiency here is costing us 50% of one person’s living situation. Minimum wage is about $8/hour. So a more concrete measure is we’re losing ~60 minimum wage hours a month. We should be willing to pay someone that much to fix this transaction problem.
And that’s just for this one project.
I presume they’re using patreon because people know it and are willing to use it, but this is a coordination problem, and a rather serious one at that should this medium become more popular.
This is certainly worth considering. But in counterpoint – building an alternative platform (one that *in particular* solves the problem of ‘people can donate each month without having to pay attention _and_ people know is reasonably bug free and works smoothly’) is a nontrivial undertaking.
This isn’t to say it’s not worth it, but it actually matters how much time it’d take. If something quick can be thrown together in 5-10 hours, it’s definitely worth it (each hour providing about $500 worth of value for one year of REACH. If it’s 40 hours, probably still worth it but less overwhelmingly so.
I think doing this well enough to succeed not just for REACH but also for all analogous projects in the future would require not just a bare-bones working project, but an actual quality platform that would end up being more like “build a competitor for Patreon” than anything quick (which would most likely end up charging as well).
I do agree someone should look into this but I’m not as confident it’ll turn out to be a quick project.
I will say that if anyone wants to build this, I recommend using Plaid (a service partnered with stripe) which uses ACH payments instead of credit cards, for much smaller fees (at least for larger donations).
Found a big list of crowd funding options. Don’t have to set up our own, just need to find one that is both low fee and trustworthy.
https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/other-crowdfunding
Finding a superior option seems doable in 5-10 hours?