Charging money per patron

API Feedback
1

Listing this under the feedback category because it looks like billing creators is just generally left to developers to implement. As you guys know billing gets very complex very quickly and it would be amazing if you guys could tackle this.

Request: I would like to be able to charge based on how many patrons are using my service, and I’d like for Patreon to collect the money directly from the users.

Generic Example:
Say I (a third party developer) create a site where creators can post content that’s only interesting to customers using VR headsets. Obviously most people don’t have VR headsets. and Patreon doesn’t seem to have any way for users to select specific rewards - creating a whole new set of tiers for “low tier + vr”, “medium tier + vr”, etc seems like overkill - so billing this in a way that works for me and the creators is a little tricky.

Since I’m running a web service my costs will scale per user so a flat rate per creator isn’t a good fit for me. And creators don’t know how many users are actually interested in the VR content so a flat rate isn’t great for them either. Instead a fee of say 20 cents per patron that accesses the service per month would seem reasonable for everyone. But the reality of that model is that to make sure I got paid I’d have to create a prepaid tier system plus some way of topping up. The complexity of doing that is obviously huge.

So if one of these options were available it would be amazing:

  1. I could simply tell Patreon somehow that my app costs 20 cents per user that accesses it per month Patreon could redirect 20 cents from each users payment to me. The developer would know that users were actually using my app since Patreon is keeping track not some random third party dev, and I would know that I was going to get paid at a reasonably high rate because Patreon is collecting the payments.

  2. Patreon had some way of creating add on rewards that exist outside of tiers and were matched to specific apps. I.e. Discord access is $1 and Discord gets 20 cents of it.

Obviously an alternative way to do it would be for me to just collect payments from the users directly when they start using my app and then create incentive for creators to post content by directing a big chunk of that payment to the creators the users are following - but that’s just recreating Patreon!