Sounds like Patreon helped you after all.
I'm not saying that they promote or market you, but having the name (much like Apple) seems enough to encourage people to pay you.
OTOH, I certainty don't think that their cut sounds like a good deal; rather, it sounds more like your options are a bad deal or no deal at all.
If you have a design/image creation software and XCode you could make almost any app.
Patreon doesn’t give any tools to creators to directly create.
That dude writes as if he is unaware of the existence of the government and tax laws. He is on a platform that is built for non-profits despite obviously not being a non-profit. And he does not seem to have heard of any kind of thing like international digital tax or the like.
When you just ignore the existence of such things, of course ~14% looks like a lot.
My spreadsheet says the total cut of my take that goes to Patreon and payment processing is about 10-15%, but I am an Early Adopter who gets a much better deal from them. For someone like this dude who doesn’t have this deal and has their usurious international fees on top of it, it’s definitely a bad choice.
Patreon did one big thing: they took the concept of “monthly donations to support the arts” and repackaged it in a way that took off. I never got support via the old PayPal donation button like I have via Patreon.