And that's why the older model worked better: a donor would pledge $1 to twenty creators, and would get charged one $20 transaction fee at the beginning of each month.

The creators ate the Paypal fee (usually 4-5%), and then Patreon collected an additional 5% for simply coordinating these exchanges with their service.

I doubt there were many people who only pledged $1 to one creator and that was it. But if that was truly a problem, then sure, one 35-cent charge per month would be reasonable.

Thank you for explaining. I never understood the aggregation of donations process. Maybe a majority of their customers are paying $1 to 1 person? Are there really people that give away x $1/month to multiple random internet folks? I don't get it.

Hi, I pay $1-$3 to about 10 creators, plus some higher pledges.

A $1 pledge, to me, is a way to say "I enjoy your content. I want you to keep doing it, instead of needing to quit and get a 'real job'. And I use adblock so you aren't otherwise getting any benefit from my enjoyment.". When 1000s of other people make the same $1/mo decision as me, the creator has a stable income, and they create more and better content, which is good for me.

I like to listen to podcasts a lot, which is pretty common. Typically I'm going to consume a fair number of individual podcast episodes during a month, but they're all from a wide variety of podcast creators, many of whom I'd like to support on Patreon. I'm not going to pledge $10 to every single podcast I listen to, because then I'm paying hundreds of dollars a month for podcasts. I also don't want to send a bunch of money to just one among the many podcasts I like. I'd like to spread out my support across the different content creators, each of which I feel has given me something of value.

Uh that's the point of Patreon. I like a newsletter, I give them a buck a month, it's a popular newsletter, so it's not unreasonable to say if only a few thousand people give just a buck then the guy has made a living out of the newsletter. And so on. When throwing in a buck I am like "surely there are many others, hopefully this stays alive but oh well if not".

When throwing in five bucks or more especially per creation I am like "you are one of my favorite musicians please give us more" (and then I put in Taylor Davis' Carol Of The Bells and just feel good).

Are you serious? The Internet shouldn't have to know the financials of a private company to comprehend a significant change to their fee structure. If they did need to know it, Patreon should provide explanation (they did not). This is 100% Patreon's fault.