Here’s what I sent them today about those fees.
Your page says the following: “A new service fee of 2.9% + $0.35 will be paid by patrons for each individual pledge starting on December 18th. This restructuring allows creators to take home a greater portion of their earnings, which is core to our mission of getting creators paid.”
This seems to be a bit absurd. Not the 2.9% or anything, that’s typical. The fact that you’re charging $0.35 per pledge instead of per authorization. Since the fees are a passthrough from the credit card companies and they charge them on a per authorization basis, you’d be getting charged around $3.54 for my $110 monthly pledge, but you’d be claiming $31.19 additional in fees from that pledge to cover that $3.54 charge.
The whole point of Microtransaction pledge sites like Patreon are to defray the costs of the credit card fees by spreading it across many smaller transactions. With charging this fee, what point really is there to having it? I might as well just make a monthly Paypal pledge to each of them individually and it would cost the same amount.