How (much) Patreon sucks, and why it might be the understatement of the year to call Simplero a great alternative to Patreon

One of my favorite people on the planet…

(Let's just say it's someone I follow).

...he recently announced that he was leaving the platform Patreon, and that if I wanted to support him still, I would have to sign up again and enter my credit card on his website.

I am not going to tell you who it is, as I’d rather keep that private, and it’s not even interesting.

What IS interesting about it, though…

Is that I didn’t sign up again, even though I don’t mind supporting him.

Why?

Because I’m lazy, and you should presume that your customers are lazy too, and that’s why you have to be abso-freaking-lutely sure that the platform you are using to monetize your audience is 100% rock solid and that they:

• won't go out of business
  
  
• will not ban you just because you said something they don’t like or anything else.
  
  
• they have (next to) no down time
  
  
• they can afford great developers, and thus will always be up-to-date
  
  

– and so on and so forth.

But why am I bringing this up?

Is Patreon not a solid platform if you're an artist who want to monitize your audience?

Well, kind of no.

At least not in terms of how they treat their customers.

(And you can't have weak links in the chain, can you?).

And that’s why a lot of people are leaving Patreon right now – and probably why said hero of mine is leaving too, because they (Patreon) have been screwing over some of their customers, and if you get banned from a service that you’ve relied on for income, then you're sh*t out of luck (to put it mildly). Maybe they would even ban me for saying that, who knows? But I'd never use them anyhow.

Our founder and CEO Calvin Correli did a video about this, and about why people who are on Patroen would do well to consider using Simplero instead.

You should go watch the video below, he is charismatic, and as you might know, hearing his crispy and sexy voice feels almost as good as smoking grass (at least, that’s what I hear, never tried the latter myself).

But just in case you don’t have time right now, here are the main points about why you should consider Simplero, not just as an alternative, but as a WAY better alternative to Patreon, than Patreon itself.

• Simplero never touches your coinage (we merely coordinate with your payment processor)
  
  
• With Simplero you can upsell your patr(e)ons with emails and more.
  
  
• We’ve been around for years, our code is rock solid
  
  
• Our customers are making real money ($135 million when last we checked)
  
  
• We’ve never banned a user before
  – and IF we ever did because of REALLY bad behavior. Only in case it was actually illegal and we were forced to take action. And also, even if we did, the money and credit card info would still be in their own payment processor outside Simplero. 
  
  
• Simplero just works (bitches).
  
  
• It’s not expensive to make money with us
  (that is: We don’t take a percentage of your revenue (like Patreon does, when you make a thousand bucks, they take away 50 from you)
  
  

There are many more good reasons to switch, or to just start out with Simplero instead of Patreon.

But you just can't wait to go watch Calvin can you?

Well, off you run...

Morten Spindler
Community Manager at Simplero

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Here is a transcript of the live video, if you'd rather read it:

Happy new year rock stars, how are ya’ll doing, I hope you had a fun new years eve – mine was kinda lame, but here we are…

It’s 2019 and I’m very excited about it being 2019 actually. 2018 was a fantastic year for me and for us at Simplero and I’m very excited about how 2019 is looking.

So, I wanted to talk to you quickly about Patroen. If you’re not familiar with it, Patreon is a platform where you as a creator can monitize your audience, so you can just ask people for donations, and then they can subscribe to like a specific monthly donation amount, and then in exchange you give the access to certain types of content and whatnot, and there’s been some issues lately with Patreon, there is a guy named Benjamin, his… I guess artist name is Sargon of Akkad or something like that. I haven’t been following him, I don’t really particularly know much about him, but I know that he was kicked off the platform without warning and without recourse, which sucks - and he was kicked off for something that he did off the platform on someone elses podcast or something or someone elses channel and presumably like quoted out of context and misunderstood and like that, so…

A lot of people are leaving Patreon right now, and I can understand why and a lot of people are concerned about this, so I just wanted to suggest that if you’re one of those people that are hit by that and are on Patreon and are looking for an alternnative to Patreon, then Simplero could actually be the perfect solution for you, actually I believe it is an amazing solution for your situation, so…

With Simplero you can easily have people sign up for subsciptions at various levels and just charge them every month and depending what subscription they sign up for, they get acces to different kinds of content and you know modules and whatnot where you can push out content on a regular basis. So that’s super easy, they can subscribe to that content via podcast feed, all that stuff…

And very importantly… with Simplero:

We never touch your money.

That’s the problem with Patreon, is that they collect your money, it lands in their bank account and then they pay it out to you, or… maybe not, maybe they freeze it, maybe they just kick you out, or maybe they hold on to it for a long time, they’ve been known to do things like that in the past, and with Simplero we never touch your money, it doesn’t flow through us, we just coordinate it with you payment processor. So if you use Stripe or Paypal or authorize-dot-net whatever it is, you can just use uhmm you know you can sign up with them, you can have multiple of them so just like hedge your bets a little or hedge your risk a little bit, and then, yea we can’t freeze your money.

Of course Paypal can freeze your money, the credit card companies can fiddle with you, but that’s kinda like where we’re at right now, unless you wanna go full on bitcoin, I haven’t really seen this as a viable solution right now, so really I think this is as good as it gets as you’re gonna get it in this point of time, and another thing that you get with Simplero is you get the whole email marketing piece, so you move your newsletter and your mailing list over there, you can do much more targeted mailing probably, depending on what you’re doing today, but again you get everything integrated so you can actually use that email list to sell memberships and donations and upsell them on different things, you can obviously do online courses and additional content on top of what you’re doing on top of just getting special access to content and and or access to you or whatever kind of rewards you wanna offer people, so lots of options here for monitizing your audience, Simplero is perfect for it it’s got everything you need with the video hosting and you have your website there and your email marketing and all the donations and plus products and whatever the hell you wanna sell on there… all under one roof, and without us ever being able to even being able to if we wanted to, which we wouldn’t want to we can’t possibly touch your money.

And this is available today.

I know I saw this announcement by Dave Ruben and Jordan Peterson that they’re working on an alternative to Patreon, but it’s not ready, as far as I understand, they’ve been working on it for a couple of years and it’s still not ready so it might happen it might not happen, as we all know software is a complicated beast and it surely takes a lot longer that we think it will and that we want it to etc, Simplero is here TODAY, it’s robust, it’s been out there for years, Simplero customers have collectively made over 100 million US dollars, 101 million as of this morning when I last checked, which means people are making real money using this thing, and yea it’s rock solid, it’s robust, we’ve got your back, we’ve got the best freaking support in the world, we’ve got the most amazing support team, and the fact that you have everything under one roof means that you have one place to go for your customer service and they’re even on today, it’s new years day it’s a holiday, we’re there 24-7 helping, answering questions ‘cause we know that you’re all over the world, and you’re like a lot of you guys are working on sundays or holidays or whatever it’s a holiday, that’s when you get uninterrupted work time. I don’t know some people (I at least) have the tendency to fall into that trap, which I’m not sur… I wouldn’t… what I love my work right, although I do think it’s important to take time off, which I do too, but why would you have to do it on a holiday when everyone else has their day off, right? It’s much better to take you day off on a tuesday than like on the weekend where it’s super crowded everywhere, so anyway, so holiday is a great opportunity for you to to get some work done and so that’s why we make sure that we’re there for you when it’s a holiday as well.

So, yea, come check out Simplero if you’re looking for a great alternative to Patreon that’s already there, ready to rock right now, no waiting.

Hey Nicole thanks for your comments, all right, that’s all I got for you today, I hope you are as exited as I am about the new year, see you all soon, bye… 

Calvin Correli.