Dear Patreon sponsors: who wants to leave? (Value-Added Tax and other issues.) · 11:18pm Jun 14th, 2021
There's never going to be a better time to do this.
...seriously: I've already lost two sponsors in one day for Reasons Which I Hope Are Not Related To Their Having Personal Financial Problems. (When I see someone pull all of their pledges from everyone they're sponsoring, I assume bad things. When it's just me, I assume I screwed up. This was a mix.) If I'm going to go for the hat-trick-plus, it should really be today.
I want to talk about Value-Added Tax. To start.
Before we go into the details, let's have Patreon itself explain how they handle VAT.
But the short version is this: VAT is a tax placed on goods and services by several countries, including most of the European Union. It can be pretty high in some areas, and it very much applies to digital services. Legally, it can be placed on pledges, and Patreon is required to collect it. They do so on every pledge coming from one of those countries, every time. And to use the example they posted, if there's a local VAT of 23% and if you're pledged to me for one dollar, you're probably not enjoying having to pay out $1.23.
So what's the solution?
Well... there's a few ways to go, and the first is exactly that: you're a sponsor, you shrug and go. Here's the link to my Patreon page: you can find the disconnect options from there. Hat-trick-plus ahoy.
Or we just live with it. Taxes are an annoying fact of life.
So is the battle to get around them.
So how do we do that?
No, really. Now?
So...
I don't think VPNs are going to work here. I'm pretty sure that to register as a sponsor, you need to give Patreon an address. They can definitely see where your pledge is coming from. Fool Netflix all you like with I'm On Vacation, Now Give Me The Ponies, but Patreon? Not so much.
People can get fed up with this and leave. Decide it's part of the price and stay. But if we're trying to prevent VAT excess, I can only think of two options. And the first is my tip jar, because Ko-Fi doesn't seem to charge VAT. It's supposedly possible to set up for recurring tips, and have them charged on a monthly basis. I haven't attempted to do it myself, but the system claims it can be done.
There's at least two issues there.
1. I might need to change my membership to Ko-Fi Gold. (There's probably fees.)
2. I pledge-charge on a per-posting basis, and usually try to post five things per month. On Patreon, you can cap your pledge: one per month, five, even six or more if you think I'm going to try for it. Ko-Fi would need to be a single, stable number. So if you set up your five-post number and I only put up four one-shots and/or chapters? I just ripped you off.
(ETA: to my knowledge, well prior to this blog going up, I had one person switch to Ko-Fi because of VAT. They've been manually inputting their pledge at the end of each month. So their country doesn't VAT on that site -- but it's currently a personal input, not an automatic collection. And the lack of VAT may not apply to all nations.)
Now, there is a second option. But it's also the nuclear one, and... it's something we've needed to talk about for a while.
Take a breath, and a line break. This is about to get ugly.
...so most of you are probably familiar with what happened to Knighty, as far as Patreon is concerned. If not, prepare for the short version.
Knighty was on Patreon for a while. He had to be: the site costs money to operate. (I don't want to think about the server bills.) There aren't that many ads and whenever he's tried to put in a few more, the complaints echo in from everywhere. So he went on Patreon, pledge sponsors got to block out the ads, had access to a special Discord channel, and the server bills got paid.
Recently, Patreon kicked him off. Because Patreon, like so many other sites -- eBay comes to mind here -- is trying to pretend they have no adult content. Nothing objectionable. A family site.
I'm going to be direct with you. There are times when this site hosts stories which I don't want to read, and those times can appear on an hourly basis. There's content which I, at a minimum, object to. (You don't want to know about the maximum.) Get into the darkest parts of the Mature rating and physical illness may await. The fact that we're working with equines seems to end-run around a few laws. And... that's the way the site has been from the beginning.
If you're reading or writing those works? Then please understand that I don't. That's my solution. I don't look. I don't want to look. Please leave it at that. I'm not looking for a massive Comments fight, and we might get one anyway.
(Besides, for a good part of the site membership, 'objectionable content which brings physical illness' means my story catalog.)
Patreon supposedly offered Knighty a solution. It wasn't 'We won't look'. It was 'clean up the site'. Remove all content which they found objectionable -- within a fairly short time frame -- and FIMFiction could stay.
...so Knighty's on SubscribeStar now...
(I'm not sure it would have been possible to 'clean up' the site. I'm also not sure where it would have stopped. It's probably not a good idea to talk about that either.)
Here's the thing:
On the day Knighty announced what was going on, I went around to every FIMFic-related Patreon page I could remember to see if they were still up. (They were.)
And ever since, I've been waiting for them to write me.
To tell me I'm banned.
...so the joke there would be that ultimately, Bangception killed me. I did ask everyone if they thought posting it would be a good idea...
The Mature stories are a small part of my catalog, and they aren't explicit -- but they exist. If Patreon is kicking people out for 'adult' content, then you could easily argue that I've crossed the line. And even when I don't work in Mature itself, I deal with a lot of mature subjects within the context of the Teen rating. Depending on how clean and family-friendly Patreon wants to be... well, it's easy for me to see any number of the Teen stories crossing the line too. And maybe an Everyone or two. Six.
I have been waiting for the Get Out letter since Knighty got his on the fifth of May. Nothing yet. So maybe this isn't the wave which gets me.
Maybe it's the next one.
Or the next.
Or the next...
Option #2 is for me to leave Patreon entirely. Find another site which will accept my traffic, and ask everyone to shift there. And, as long as I'm at it, try to find one which doesn't collect VAT.
...yeah. That won't be easy. And the truth? I don't want to leave unless I have to. Patreon gave me a place where, after I asked for help, I could watch that help be delivered. My sponsors are the doctors who saved my life: Patreon is the well-equipped triage tent. There's something in me which doesn't want to just walk away.
But I also have to consider what I'm going to do if I'm kicked out.
(ETA: if nothing else, I'm posting my work on a banned site. Guilt by association.)
SubscribeStar exists. (I don't know much about them. Some people are suspicious about their initials.) Maybe there's other site options, and I'm hoping y'all are going to suggest a few below.
...not OnlyFans.
Also, that wasn't funny.
...not Twitch either. Writing livestreams? Come on...
There are more options, of course. There's whatever the group might come up with, because I hardly know what all of the solutions might be. Maybe you do. We can talk about it in the Comments. But on the whole, I'd like to save those who pay VAT from going through the trouble. If you know of a means which would accomplish that? Please speak up. Now's the time.
And if you can think of a fallback position -- somewhere I should go if Patreon does kick me (or maybe that's more of a when) -- please let me know.
I don't work in many of the categories which Patreon found objectionable. I can't and won't.
But you never know when they'll decide to come for you.
I will be monitoring my Patreon page for the rest of the night.
It's kind of like watching a tote board go in reverse.
...hey, who remembers tote boards?
We'll likely never know for certain but I'm of the opinion Knighty received the notice due to someone filing a report to Patreon and not because of any proactive activity on the part of Patreon. So you're going to have to wait till you disgruntle someone enough that they want to get you banned.
Probably worth looking into SubscribeStar to see if it's feasible. If worst comes to worst, it'll be a lot less stressful if you have a plan in place.
FTFY: There are times when this site hosts stories which I don't want to read, and those times can appear
on an hourly basisevery second.5535327
Oh. So starting from a few years ago.
If I have done nothing else on this site, I've ticked some people off.
Well fuck, does knighty get enough money to keep this site running? I know thats not the question but learning this made me worried
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I couldn't say. I know he has less people on SubscribeStar than he did on Patreon, and I think I can predict that he would appreciate all pledges sent in his direction. But I don't know how much his totals have changed.
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Ok I'm going to support him. Thanks for writing about that, not that it was the point of your blog but I'm glad I know
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S'okay. I'm glad he's getting a little more help.
Knighty posted about his problems in a blog entry. My suggestion at the time was that he move it to the front page. It didn't happen -- and that resulted in some people not knowing what was going on.
Surely a non-zero quantity of those are mine.
Pepe Lepew got banned from the internet for his conduct. (You ever see one of his cartoons, you know why) (Europe)
Baen's Bar got kicked off for a few months because of patron's language (USA, threats of violence)
So, yes, it's a problem. Amazon is big enough they can get by, most others ain't
The USA has more liberal porn laws than most other countries
Just upload those to PornHub. The experience of seeing especially... let's go with inspired... fiction be conjured into writing could qualify as a torture fetish of some kind, right?
I’ve mentioned the option before on Discord, but I thought I’d write it out here in more detail. As I see it, if you were to start posting all new stories on Patreon itself as well as here when you publish them, I think that Patreon couldn’t really take issue. From their perspective, they are collecting money for the stories you post on their site. That those stories are also on another site that they disapprove of is something outside of their control.
It would likely mean that you couldn’t monetize any future Mature stories unless confident that they stayed within Patreon’s guidelines, but you could still post such stories here if you wanted to and leave Patreon out of it.
I also don’t think you’d need to add your existing catalog to Patreon… just start posting stories that you will be collecting for moving forward (or from the start of the billing period). At that point, your patrons are *technically* paying for you to post stories onto Patreon, and that’s the end of that site’s involvement. Whether patrons ever read them at Patreon or just read them all here is up to them.
As you’ve noted, you’d need to make sure that Patreon has the formatting to do this easily enough…. But it seems like a potentially easy way to shield yourself from any kind of direct FimFiction disapproval over there.
There needs to be a certain critical motivation for me to switch over and do business with another site. Having two separate artist support bills every month would be a pain. For me, you saying “fuck Patreon, I’m moving to Subscribestar” would be enough. Can’t speak for others though. Would certainly advise looking into it and being prepared BEFORE you absolutely have to.
5535353 I would already have renewed my pledge to FimFic on SubscribeStar, except for this:
Even my own MegaCorp bank has been hacked, and pulled stupid stunts like placing mass unencrypted customer data (like mine) on a laptop (which was then stolen). So I have too little confidence that SubscribeStar won't be hacked in a way that forces me to get a new credit card, and Paypal isn't an option. I really need to think about it, and convince myself for certain either way.
That said, if you move to something other than Patreon, at least you have multiple options.
man I just like when you update stuff it's nbd on my end
edit: oh heck yeah Glimmer updated I've been looking forward to that for months
This is why one puts one's mature stories on a different handle.
I don’t see what the big problem is. Jest has a patron, and some of those writings are clearly M, a lot more so than most/all of yours. The big issue is that someone needs to complain before Patreon will do anything. This will come up on SubscribeStar or anywhere else. If someone wants to cause trouble, it won’t matter which platform you are on.
For me, I'm happy to support you because I feel like it helps someone who I appreciate! And the stories are more than enough entertainment to justify the cost. If it ever did become too much and I had to stop Patreonning you, I'd at least tell you why I was withdrawing my support. And it would be financial on my end, not because of anything you did.
If you swap over to a non-patreon system, that works too. It's whatever is the best way to help out, as far as I'm concerned.
I could say a lot about everything in this journal. so much that I could easily fill an entire paragraph or seven on the vat stuff alone. instead I'll focus on the patreon stuff and say jump ship now and go to subscribestar. I'm on the short list of folks who bore witness to the beginning of what patreon is doing and the rise of subscribestar. Of course one has to ask why is patreon whining about this stuff well it's because the major credit cards are whining and now ask yourself why do the major credit cards whine? The answer to that question is kinda telling and disturbing.
Well I don't read much site news so I appreciate your brief recap, it also got me to follow knighty in case of any other future posts like that.
Dove into the comments on those posts and it was a mistake!
I don't think you will have a problem with patreon considering the nature of the issue, and it was different from what I expected. There are quite a few mature content artists making rather overt works on there, but the VAT issue I see as being a moving target that is going to be applied to many different services in the future.
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Yeah, that's my problem with Subscribestar as well. Like, I want to use it? But aside from my reservations about putting credit card data online, I don't even own a credit card, and since Subscribestar isn't doing anything but credit cards (no paypal, no IDeal) I literally can't.
But as for supporting you, Estee, I'm still supporting. Yeah, VAT is a thing, but I'm Dutch, VAT is something I'm used to.
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Yea, its almost certainly 'One or more persons did a report that caused a genuine manual review' and from there, well, search certain strings and boom.
I don't think you need to worry
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The easiest solution to this issue is to get a pre-paid, reloadable debit card. It basically works the same as a gift card, except that when it runs low on cash you can just take it back to any merchant that sells them and put more money into it. As far as most merchants are concerned, it's just another Visa or Mastercard. (And I think American Express has one too, for that matter, but not as many merchants take Amex.)
For that matter... does PayPal still offer that Visa "debit" card of their own that lets you tap into your Paypal balance? Or did they drop those? That might be another option if they still have those...
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Thank you for your advice, but the thing is, I don't own a credit card because I can't get one, I don't own a credit card because I don't need one. Over here in the Netherlands, transferring money straight to and from your bank account is incredibly common in almost any situation, and paypal or the growing use of IDeal handles almost all my online needs. A credit card, prepaid or otherwise, always runs into the wall of "just what do I need this for, and is it worth the cost?"
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Given some of the content this site hosts, it was a question of when, not if.
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One reason to have a credit card that you use for purchases, and pay off immediately, is so you have an extra step of protection. Your bank account isn't directly exposed and if you are a victim of identity theft or fraud it is the credit card company's problem ultimately.
Getting a new credit card issued is much easier than opening new bank accounts and transferring funds, although your bank will eventually pay you back for fraud, there might be delays while you have a compromised account that is probably frozen.
US specific advice here but it seems applicable internationally. Your mileage may vary, etc.
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Less so here in the Netherlands, where our PIN passes already are an extra layer of security for most purchases. It's not fool-proof, but I have heard far more stories about people's credit card data getting out and wreaking havoc on finances than I have about PIN passes being cracked to empty accounts. For me and how I generally do purchases, a credit card would, as far as I can see, be a downgrade in security if anything.
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It's laregely the same all over the world. There's a security number on the back of my debit card, that is served through Visa, it has a chip and what not for point of sale purchases. There is of course a separate PIN for my bank account. The major difference is a credit card, if compromised, can't burn through your personal bank account.
Back in the early 00s I had a rogue connection from Madagascar try to access my online banking. Closing and re-opening all my accounts was awful. I didn't lose anything since my bank knew I wasn't teleported to Madagascar overnight, but I still went through the process for safety reasons. No clue to this day how I had my account information stolen.
Credit and Debit, although both generally served by the same systems, are entirely separate. Don't get me started on credit ratings and how awful that entire mess is though.
I only just heard of Commisio. No, that's not misspelled. An artist friend got locked out of Patreon (which is how he makes his income) for NSFW. Commisio was the only one he found which fit all of his requirements.
... I don't know if VAT would apply. Something to research, perhaps?