How does the Patreon system work? Decline payments, outstanding amounts etc

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Hi!

Although I’m familiar with how Patreon works in general, there are some specifics of the system that I am unclear on. Any clarification would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

  1. If a reward requires shipping is an address mandatory, or can there be cases where a user chooses a reward that includes a physical component but does not provide their address?
  2. Do is_paused pledges count towards the user_limit, or does a user relinquish their reward when they pause? or can the number of patrons exceed the user_limit if a payment is declined then resumed by fixing billing details?
  3. Does a pledge that has been declined_since continue to gather an outstanding amount? e.g: If I pledge $5 per month and my payment is declined this month, will my outstanding balance be $5 until the charge succeeds or will it grow by $5 each month?
  4. How often are declined payments retried?
  5. Is there any circumstance in which pledges are automatically deleted?
  6. Does patron_pays_fees ever equal true, or is this a legacy/unimplemented feature?
  7. Does pledge_cap_cents refer to the cap a patron can set for per post campaign types?
  8. Do payment declined pledges count towards the user_limit, or does a user relinquish their reward when their payment is declined?
  9. What does the outstanding_payment_amount_cents value on the Campaign resource represent?
  10. What pledge values make up the pledge_sum value on a Campaign resource? Does this exclude declined pledges?
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Reviewing the Patreon support site I believe I’m able to answer questions 3 and 4 myself, but confirmation these answers are correct would be helpful:

  1. No — “Please note that a patron will only ever have one declined bill. If they decline once, we will not continue to charge them for future months.” via support.patreon.com.
  2. For up to 5 days — “We will try to collect funds for the first 5 days […] We’ve found that 5 days is about the point when continuing to retry the existing payment method won’t make a difference, and new billing information is needed.” via support.patreon.com.
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Phew! Great questions. @telaviv is here with me and we’re gonna do our best. This is really helpful to write out and we should totally put it in our developer guides/FAQ - so thank you for asking these.

If a reward requires shipping is an address mandatory, or can there be cases where a user chooses a reward that includes a physical component but does not provide their address?

The answer is yes. For example, as a patron I can choose to pay say, $5.00, while explicitly choosing no reward in the pledge checkout flow. If as a patron I chose a reward, the shipping address is required.

Do is_paused pledges count towards the user_limit, or does a user relinquish their reward when they pause? or can the number of patrons exceed the user_limit if a payment is declined then resumed by fixing billing details?

They do count toward the limit, as do declined pledges.

Does a pledge that has been declined_since continue to gather an outstanding amount? e.g: If I pledge $5 per month and my payment is declined this month, will my outstanding balance be $5 until the charge succeeds or will it grow by $5 each month?

It will remain $5 - it will not accumulate.

How often are declined payments retried?

Without getting into detail, there’s an entire system in place which is very effective in getting declined/retried payments processed for creators. These range from automatic retries to persistently encouraging patrons to update their information.

Is there any circumstance in which pledges are automatically deleted?

There are several ways in which a pledge may be deleted outside of patrons explicitly deleting that pledge. These include:

  • Patron deleting a payment method that was paying for that pledge
  • Creators blocking patrons
  • Trust and safety actions, etc.

Does patron_pays_fees ever equal true, or is this a legacy/unimplemented feature?

This indeed a legacy/unimplemented feature. We really need to clean up these resources in future versions!

Does pledge_cap_cents refer to the cap a patron can set for per post campaign types?

Yes! Correct. This is a weird one, since at the pledge checkout flow patrons set the cap by number of posts in the UI. However, our internal payments logic converts it to dollars.

Do payment declined pledges count towards the user_limit, or does a user relinquish their reward when their payment is declined?

Declined pledges do count toward the user_limit.

What does the outstanding_payment_amount_cents value on the Campaign resource represent?

Odd answer unfortunately: We recommend not using this field. We’ll be cleaning this up in future versions.

For your last question I’ve asked @carmein for help!

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Thank you very much for the answers! Very helpful and appreciated. I’ll probably have a couple more soon(ish), but generally, everything seems to be easy to understand based on the developer documentation and the patreon help site. Thanks again!

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Hi @sam! Awesome questions. I’m on the Patreon Payments Team and happy to help with question #10.

What pledge values make up the pledge_sum value on a Campaign resource? Does this exclude declined pledges?

The pledge_sum value is the dollar amount you see on a creator’s public page (when the creator has made it visible). You can find it on the creator’s page where you see “$X per thing” or “$X per month”

More granularly, this dollar amount reflects:

  • If they’re a per-month creator, it’s the expected take-home dollar amount for the month.
  • If they’re per-thing, it’s the expected take-home dollar amount from the creator’s first post (subsequent posts are affected by patrons’ monthly post caps).

… take-home dollar amount is calculated by taking the total sum of pledges multiplied by the percentage we expect the creator to take home (based on their individual history).

It does not include pledges that have already declined. It does, however, assume that the rest of the pledges will process (i.e. as if no more declines will happen).

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Great, thank you! Very helpful :slight_smile:

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