A Tentative Warning About 2025 - Patreon Making Changes (Patreon)

Hey all!

We're not planning any changes on our end, just so you know, so don't worry about that! I wanted to quickly address a situation we'll have to tackle in late 2025.

The situation is this: the Apple store is forcing Patreon to comply with particular demands if they want to remain up on it, and Patreon is unfortunately giving in. Patreon is currently in the process of switching everyone on the site over to the subscription billing system (in which you, as patrons, are billed the same time each month as when you signed up). This means they're removing the per-pledge system, which is what we use. Patreon is giving creators until November 2025 to make the switch, then will be forcing us to switch everything over.

What does that mean for Project Mouthwash?

Our system is based on getting 4-6 pledge posts out of a month. You all define how many you are willing to pay for/how much per post, and we send them all to you even if you only pay once per month. It's a system that allows many of you to give extra to help us out if we get extra content out, and we haven't failed to post multiple pledge-worthy posts since we switched to this system almost a decade ago.

Once they force us to switch away from this system, we intend to keep making the same content (or more, given we won't have to worry about being economic about what counts as pledge-worthy), but it also means we'll only make that first pledge's worth each month. This will cut our income through Patreon down to a bit under half of what we currently make and will stab into our production pipeline since we might not be able to keep all our current hands on board as often. We'll have to lean into Nat19 to make up a lot of the difference, but it'll mean a lot of difficulty on our end.

What can you do?

You have over a year to consider things and to be clear; we don't expect you to change anything! When the switch comes in November 2025, you will basically all be moved to monthly single payments at the tier/amount you've chosen. We might revisit our tier structure, but we don't want to cause any difficulty for those on them.

If you want to help us prepare for the shift, then we graciously ask you to consider the following: If you currently have no cap on how many times you can be charged, please consider changing your pledge to be charged only once but for the equivalent of three pledges. We currently do six usually each month.

For example:

If you currently do $5/up to six times a month, consider changing it to $15/once per month.

If you currently do $50/three times a month, consider switching it to $150/once per month.

Changes like these would keep you all paying roughly the same amount, but in the form of one pledge, and when we shift over to the new system around November 2025 it would mean things would stay roughly the same. Of course, if you're uncapped and want to do, for example, $30/month instead of $5/six times a month, then that makes sense too - we just don't want to ask people to budget out expecting six pledges (even though it's what we always do).

We're sorry for the need to make this post, and later in 2025 we'll post a video explaining it more clearly. Our hope is that payment stays roughly the same on both ends so we can keep going as we are. Originally we did the per-pledge system because we wanted to always be held accountable to releasing content in exchange for being paid, but we never foresaw Patreon axing the system entirely so late in the game.