Patreon's new iOS pricing and what it means for OctoPrint (Patreon)

Hey there! You might have seen some news break yesterday about changes regarding Patreon and iOS. And I figured it might be a good idea to explain how that will impact this campaign here.

What's happening?

Yesterday Patreon sent me this in an email:

Apple is requiring that Patreon use their in-app purchasing system and remove all other billing systems from the Patreon iOS app by November 2024. This means that starting in November, new memberships purchased in the iOS app will be subject to Apple's 30% App Store fee.

What this means is that from November onward, all new Patrons subscribing through the Patreon iOS app (instead of the browser or the Patreon Android app) will see 30% of their subscription payments go to Apple instead of the creator they want to support. This is in addition to the 5% that Patreon is taking and the 5-8% taken away for payment processing.

That is a quite substantial cut!

Thankfully, Patreon is giving creators an option here - we can either take the 30% hit ourselves, or increase our tier prices only for people who newly subscribe through the iOS app. For OctoPrint, I will chose the latter, but will make sure to communicate front right and center that new backers really should be subscribing via their web browser instead of through the Patreon iOS app to save themselves some money.

Will this affect you as an existing backer?

As far as I currently understand, no. From November onwards, this will only affect new backers subscribing through the iOS app, no one else. Even new backers who subscribe through a web browser or the Patreon Android app should not be affected, regardless of whether they also happen to use the Patreon iOS app for accessing Patreon at other times.

Will this affect me as the creator here?

The additional fee won't really affect me. As I already said, yes, I will be making use of Patreon's offer to charge 30% more for anyone who signs up through their iOS app. I wish that wasn't necessary, but I frankly don't see why I should be taking the punch here - I'm not even an Apple user myself, and their IMHO quite greedy fee structure is among the reasons for that. But as I said I will make sure it is properly communicated front right and center that these additional 30% for new iOS backers only can be easily avoided by just subscribing through the browser.

What will affect me however is that Patreon will also be forcing me to switch to another billing model. To quote the mail I received once more:

You're currently on a first-of-the-month billing model, but Apple's in-app purchase system only supports subscription billing.

[...]

And, as a result of Apple's mandates and in order to make sure that you can continue getting new members in the iOS app, we've started a 16-month-long migration process to bring all creators onto subscription billing by November 2025. This means that your current billing model will be discontinued in November 2025.

This means that sooner or later I'll have to switch from first-of-month billing to subscription based billing - which means anyone newly subscribing after this switch will not be billed at the start of the month anymore, but on a monthly cycle on the day they subscribed. Patreon wrote however that this will also not affect existing backers, those will continue to get charged on the first of the month.

Now, for the sticker shipment perk that new billing model makes things a bit more complicated in theory. I so far took care of the monthly shipments after the payment cycle at the start of the month completed. I really don't have the time to do multiple sticker shipments per month, and tracking all of that would also make things overly complicated. So what I'll do is, just continue as now. I'll keep sending out sticker shipments once per month, if possible during the first half. That's what I've been doing for the past 8 years on here, and I hope you are all ok with keeping things simple and the way they work without too much overhead instead of creating even more work that isn't actually part of improving OctoPrint.

Conclusion

To quickly summarize the important points:

• Any new backers starting their subscription through Patreon's iOS app will be charged 30% more come November, because that's the cut that Apple wants for anything going through them.

• Any existing backers regardless of what they used to subscribe - browser, Android app, iOS app - should not be affected.

• I'll be forced to switch this campaign over to subscription based billing. Anyone subscribing after this has been done will get charged monthly based on the day they subscribed, whereas all existing backers will continue to be charged on the first of the month.

• I'll continue fulfillment of sticker shipments on the current schedule regardless of the billing model.

• You can read more about that from Patreon here: https://news.patreon.com/articles/understanding-apple-requirements-for-patreon

In case it's not clear: I'm not very happy with this, but this is completely out of my control. I'm doing my best to keep things manageable and transparent and hope you understand my decisions about how to handle this from my end.

In the meantime, this news reached me yesterday right after I returned to work after my vacation. I'm now back in the office getting on top of my TODOs, a new OctoPrint on Air will go public tomorrow (I recorded it during my vacation and it's already in Early Access for those of you on the $5+ perks), and all in all I really just want to get back to improving OctoPrint for all of you instead of handling stuff like this, the recent manipulation situation, or whatever else decides to do a hostile takeover of my task list 😬

Cheers,
Gina