Hi there! We’ve been listening to the feedback that you and other Patreon API developers have been giving us over the past months about how our API, and our platform as a whole, could be better for developers, creators, and patrons. We’ve taken this feedback, added enhancements to respect the privacy of our creators and patrons, and turned that into a new version of our API, which is available in open beta today.
If you have created a client solely for use with the Patreon Wordpress plugin, you can ignore most of this message. Instructions on how to use the Wordpress plugin with APIv2 will be available soon.
So what’s new?
Members: We’ve taken the feedback you have about working with pledges and turned that into a more robust data model giving you more detail about a creator’s patrons, including member lifetime, charge status, and last charge date.
Webhooks: APIv2 lets developers create webhooks programmatically on the creator’s behalf, so your app can subscribe to real-time updates about what’s changing with a creator’s patrons.
Scopes: These new features are coming with a new set of scopes, to better protect the privacy of creators and patrons and to let developers get exactly what they need from our API.
Less friction: If you’re building an app that you want many creators to use, you can now do this in a self-service manner without a manual approval process with our team. Go build great things for creators!
Where do we go from here? Well, we’ve got new sections on our developer documentation page explaining the changes and the new APIs. APIv2 is in public beta TODAY, but APIv1 isn’t going away yet. In fact, you can use the new endpoints interchangeably during the transitionary phase (although the APIv1 endpoints will be going away in the future). We’ll give lots of notice here when APIv2 moves out of beta, and at that point we’ll talk about the future of APIv1.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for developing with Patreon!
Thank you for new version! I believe many developers’ve been waiting for it! But I met some bug: attributes are empty for some reasons(/identity?include=campaign), please please fix this issue, it blocks me:(
If I could press you for more info, is version 1 likely to remain live for the rest of the calendar year or is the deployment of 2 expected to go much faster than that?
I’m a one person team here and web development responsibilities in addition to content creation is becoming difficult for me. I’m hiring, but knowing whether there’s a 2-3 month deadline (allowing for development time) would be helpful.
If we’re talking late Q1 or afterwards then I’m golden.
Hey! So we don’t expect APIv2 to leave beta for a couple months, and after APIv2 leaves beta there will be at least 6 months before APIv1 is deprecated. It’s unlikely we will be deprecating APIv1 until well into Q1 2019.
Cool! Very exciting to see the new functionality (and that we’ll have a good while to do the changeover)
Especially great to see charge status included in the available information in the new API! This should result in some cleaner reconciliation between external websites and Patreon. currently_entitled_amount_cents may also provide similarly useful functionality – especially if any of these get updated more quickly than lifetime_support_cents does (last I integrated the V1 API, there was a next-day delay on updates to that field both in API and on Patron Manager).
Regarding currently_entitled_amount_cents, is there a kind of ‘entitlement_period_end’ datetime? I guess right now it’s always first of next month + grace period, but it might be nice to have this as a field in case other payment durations end up being available.
What are possible values for patron_status (is it an enum like last_charge_status?)
Also, still hoping to see some way to get member data from recently cancelled patrons (/any patrons who have currently_entitled_amount_cents > 0) per this thread.
A sandbox would be great. Another and probably an easier developer-friendly enhancement could be having a Foobar Patron, a Foobar Campaign, and a Foobar Creator all of which will always return a set of fixed values - that would facilitate developing and testing apps. And it would also allow automated test setups which could help app developers or maintainers ensure connectivity of their apps with Patreon.
The currently_entitled_tiers attribute seems to imply that a member can be a part of multiple tiers. Is that currently true? I thought a member could only belong to one tier at a time.
Hey Anna,
During the beta, we are not enforcing rate limits on API v2 endpoints, however, you should assume when building your app, that there will be rate limiting when we exit the beta period.
Thanks!
-Spencer
Thank you for your reply, Spencer. So v1 version has some limitations? I cannot find info in the docs. And I have other qs probably you can help me with it - how I can receive patron_goals of the creator? include=goals return only USD goals. Thanks Ann.
