[wl] Alice and Yuzhua - Monetization Changes (Patreon)

I have a announcement to make. Its time to rip the bandage off, please read the full post when you have time...

I made some changes to the structure of how I am pricing my content. To put it simply I was GROSSLY undervaluing my content for the entire time I've been a creator. This was by choice as i was still learning how to use AI to make artworks, I believe now I am confident my content is worth the price of entry.
And about the sub Tiers - I've unfortunately have had too many people come in and make unreasonable requests for commissions which slows down creation massively, and not to mention ruins the fun of making content.

But this isn't the fault of you guys, this is a fault of misunderstanding of how I make content, I make batches of images not individual pieces of art based on my workflows that I take a lot of time to make. This, as I understand it, not very many AI Artist do things the way that I do it, so a lot of people have came in and ask for things that they would expect a artist who makes 1-2 images per commission to make.

I want to be clear, I am not killing commissions, just scaling WAY back on them, and by extension I've unpublished the Black Label and Platinum Label tiers.

This also extends to Paypal Commissions as well. I am only going to keep the 5$ tier, and redo the rest. Eventually...

What does this mean? If you are a CURRENT subscriber nothing has changed as I've already filter out bad actors, New subs will be adjusted to new pricing, and I've removed tiers that have been massively undervalued. Again to re-iterate, if you are subbed now and continue to support me then its business as usual as I don't believe in taking away benefits that people pay for or changing their pricing out of nowhere, this only really effects new members.

I've also increased the pricing of White Label and Silver Label as well so now there is only three tiers in total now for now. Now why have I done this? Simple, three reasons...

One is that White Label Tier was a loss leader for bringing in members as I actually lose money by having people sub to this tier because of Platform and IOS app store fees bank transfer and taxes (OUCH), by the time I make a withdrawal I lose a sizable amount of money which only continues to be a problem as I continue to grow. Rather than to be rid of the White Label tier or get rid of the free trial and I raised the base price and kept the free trial.

Secondly, This tier was originally priced when I first started and those who are still here from back then know that I used to break up my content in three tiers with White Label getting the least amount of content + Decreased resolutions, I no longer do this as now White Label gets all the same content as the other tiers, and instead of lowering the resolution it now is released at the base render resolution with a watermark.

Thirdly, I've started putting out a lot bigger packs and content and the pricing of these two tiers need to be adjusted for this, keep in mind I used to only release 50-120 images a day with a 300 image pack for a weekly pack, but now I've scaled up production to 3-5x that number regularly on top of that, but as AI continues to develop and better quality generation techniques emerge the time to render increases as well. For example, 3 months ago, I rendered my images at 1024 Resolutions which took around 12 Seconds to render on my hardware but now i do 1536 resolutions which now take upwards to 40 Seconds per image,and with plans to improve to 2048 when AI Models advance and improve. This increased render, upscaling and uploading times for me DRASTICALLY, and I've made as many optimizations to my workflows to support this over the last few weeks.
This also takes into consideration for a new AI model that might change the game forever when released sometime at the end of this year or sometime next year - Chroma (based on Flux and may finally kill Stable Diffusion SXDL Models)

TL:DR Prices have changed for new members, scaling back massively on commissions due to bad actors and people refusing to follow guidelines, Increased render times + More Content = increased price as AI Art continues to evolve.

Also due to new changes in pricing opens the window of regularly doing sales and giveaways! Expect a month long sale on the First of August and a free sub tier giveaways in September all month long to celebrate 1 Year on Content Creation!

Now I know this means I may lose some of you in this change, I understand, But its important to sustain myself as I have Life Goals and plans to buy a new home in the next year, and I actually want to continue to do this for a long time well after that! To be able to do that I needed to make these changes.. Plus the Bot I made also ties into these plans as I continue to add more content packs, characters, styles, hardware improvements and supporting it for as long as I can.

Finally to end note. I hope everyone is aware of what Visa and Mastercard have been doing in their campaign to censor anime and adult content by pulling out their payment processing and this also already has affected me and many other creators as well, as some maybe aware I used to make a lot more Hardcore content but I've toned that back as well because of it. This also means at anytime my Paypal could be deleted for not following these TOS, which scares me....a lot. I am not sure what to do if that happens other than to switch to Crypto based payments. That's all I can say for now so I urge everyone to fight and campaign against Censorship, as no card processing company should have the power to tell you what you can and cannot spend your money on.

Much Love and Thank You for all the continued support, this means a lot to me, more than you will ever know, your support has really changed my life over the last several months.... 🥹