Patreon owns the relationship.
We help you own yours.
Patreon has real brand recognition and a built-in audience of patrons — credit where it's due. But the platform owns the checkout, the subscription, the discovery, and the rules. If they raise fees, change terms, or suspend your account, your business goes with them. Simplero is the platform you switch to when your audience needs to be yours.
The fee that
never goes away.
$120+/mo gone.
10% platform fee + ~2.9% payment processing = about $120/mo, every month. Over a year: $1,440 you don't see.
$1,000 × 12% × 12 = $1,440/yrSimplero Starter at this volume: $59/mo flat. The break-even is roughly $500/mo in patron revenue.
$600+/mo gone.
Same 12% all-in. That's $7,200/year Patreon takes off the top — forever.
$5,000 × 12% × 12 = $7,200/yrSimplero Scale at this volume: $149/mo flat. Annual savings: roughly $5,400.
$1,200+/mo gone.
Patreon: $14,400/year in fees. Plus currency conversion (2.5% on cross-currency patrons). Plus payout fees per transfer.
$10,000 × 12% × 12 = $14,400/yrSimplero Skyrocket: $249/mo flat. Annual savings: roughly $11,400.
Legacy creators pay 5–8% (Founders / Pro). New creators on or after Aug 4, 2025 pay the standard 10%. Plus payment processing on every transaction. The percentage never compounds in your favor.
What Patreon doesn't give you.
You don't own the relationship.
Patreon recently added exportable email lists — credit there. But the subscription itself, the patron's payment method, the recurring billing, the discoverability, and the platform's ability to suspend or remove your page all belong to Patreon. If they ban you tomorrow, your subscriber list survives. Your subscriptions don't.
No real LMS, no automation, no funnels.
Patreon does posts, audio, and video for tiers. There's no proper course builder with drip schedules, quizzes, or completion tracking. No tag-based segmentation, no behavioral triggers, no multi-step funnels, no real CRM. If you're building a business, you're adding tools.
Discovery is real — and so is dependency.
Patreon's marketplace, search, and brand recognition are genuine assets — we don't pretend otherwise. But the algorithm decides who finds you, the policies decide what you can publish, and the payouts decide when you get paid. Your business runs on someone else's rails. That's the trade.
Patreon for tipping + ConvertKit for email + Teachable for courses + Circle for community + Stripe for checkout = $200–$400/mo and 5 logins.
Simplero replaces all of it. $59/month, 0% platform fees, your list and subscriptions stay yours.
What Patreon creators actually say.
“Patreon has some of the highest fees in the creator space (10% + 3% payment processing). And the kicker: your subscription records can't really be migrated — your list survives, your recurring revenue doesn't.”
“Account got suspended, did I just lose my money? I had pending payouts and now I can't reach anyone. Patreon's support is automated and the appeals process is a black box.”
“I'm leaving Substack for Patreon and I already regret it. The fees are eating me alive.”
“I was a Patreon creator for years and watched the fee changes happen one after another. Every time, the cut got bigger and the platform got more in the middle of my relationship with my supporters. Eventually I built my own thing.”
“Help — Patreon Creator account deleted with $1.5k in earnings wiped. No warning, no explanation, no human to talk to.”
“Patreon will increase the cut it takes from new creators to 10% — up from 5–8%. The platform is profitable now and is choosing to take more from the people who built it.”
“I just want to own my list and my checkout without a 10% tax on every dollar.”
Side by side.
Whole platform vs whole platform.
| Patreon (new creators) | Simplero | |
|---|---|---|
| Platform fee | 10% of all income (legacy: 5–8%) | 0% on every plan |
| Payment processing | ~2.9% + $0.30 (cards), 5%+10¢ micropayments (legacy) | Standard Stripe/PayPal pass-through — nothing extra to Simplero |
| Currency conversion | 2.5% on cross-currency patrons | Stripe's standard rate — no Simplero markup |
| Payout fees | $0.25–$3+ per payout depending on method | Standard Stripe payout — no Simplero markup |
| Who owns the email list | You (exportable as of 2024) | You — always exportable |
| Who owns the subscriptions | Patreon — not portable | You — Stripe customer + subscription is yours |
| Email marketing engine | Basic broadcasts | Full automation + segments + behavioral triggers |
| LMS / drip courses / quizzes | — posts only | ✓ Full LMS |
| Community | Basic chats and DMs | ✓ Native — posts, threads, members |
| Automations | — | ✓ Full automation engine |
| CRM with tags + segments | — | ✓ Built in |
| Affiliate program | — | ✓ Built in |
| Native video hosting | ✓ | ✓ Unlimited |
| Custom domain | — (patreon.com/yourname) | ✓ |
| Founder access | — | ✓ Calvin still answers email |
| Years in business | 13 yrs (founded 2013) | 17 yrs (founded 2009) |
| Funding model | VC-backed · $412M raised · reportedly down from $4B peak | Bootstrapped · profitable · sovereign |
The difference that doesn't
fit in a feature matrix.
Your audience, your list, your platform.
Patreon owns the subscription. Patreon owns the discoverability. Patreon decides what content is allowed and when payouts arrive. On Simplero, your list is yours, your Stripe customer is yours, your subscriptions are portable. Export anytime. Migrate anytime. The relationship is yours.
0% platform fees vs 10%.
Forever. Patreon takes a tax on every dollar your patrons send you, regardless of how much you earn. Simplero charges a flat monthly fee — the same whether you make $1,000 or $100,000 in a month. The math gets very different very quickly.
Founder access. Bootstrapped 17 years.
Calvin still answers customer emails. Patreon raised $412M from VCs and has to keep extracting more from creators to justify a once-$4B valuation. We've never raised, never sold, never had to. The incentives line up differently when nobody's pushing for an exit.
What Simplero customers actually say.
“I scored 12 platforms on a spreadsheet. Simplero won — not because it was the cheapest, but because it was the only one that didn't make me build a Frankenstack of tools to run my actual business.”
“My income tripled, quadrupled in the last six years on Simplero. The platform grew with me — I never had to migrate.”
“I ended up paying my annual plan for Simplero in what I was paying for one month of all my subscriptions. One platform replaced five.”
“There are no chatbot-gates you have to get through to get support from an actual human. The team responds, listens, and actually fixes things.”
Simplero pricing.
Own your audience.
Own your business.
Patreon is fine for tipping. Simplero is the platform for the business you're actually building — with the list, the subscriptions, and the relationship squarely in your hands.
Founded 2009 · Bootstrapped · Proud of it.
Make it simplero™
