I'd swap that. Charge the $10 immediately, then bundle the pro-rated refund of the half of the month you missed into the first month's subscription charge.

Yeah exactly. This is the extremely simple solution which closes all loopholes and avoids a horrific mess of new fees.

I'd like to take Patreon in good faith here and assume they've just blundered into a huge mistake which benefits nobody except for the payment processors. If so, they should be correcting course in the next few days. But until that happens, I remain skeptical.

I totally agree that pro-rating seems to be by far the best and most obvious solution. So much so that it almost feels like lying by omission when they don't discuss it as a possible solution in their blog post.

I stopped using Patreon a while back when they got hacked and leaked my personal information, but before that I was donating $1 a month to a handful of creators. I feel like that isn't an atypical use case at all - maybe even the most common pledge amount for a lot of creators. And there is absolutely no way I would have been willing to pay a $0.38 fee to pledge $1.

There are often privileges and perks associated with being a patron of a certain creator. These perks aren't pro-rated, thus subscribing late in the month for a day or two might be a viable way to cheat this system. Personally, I don't think this is a huge deal, and, if this is their reasoning, it's a mistake.

You could even do it where you pay the full cost immediately, but the difference between that and the prorated cost counts as a credit to the next start-of-month payment. eg. If there's a $100 reward tier and I sign up 60% of the way through the month, I immediately pay $100, then at the start of next month my $100 pledge is discounted by the $60 I overpaid for the previous month, so I only pay $40.

Effectively, it flips the first two months so you pay the full amount immediately but if you stay on for at least two months it all balances out in the end.

EDIT: Ninja'd by sibling comment

Charge the pro-rated amount on the first of the first month and the full month's amount on the initial subscription date.

> But they missed the BIG OBVIOUS solution: charge a pro-rated "first month" pledge

The problem there is for creators who post high-value content - Jimmy McThief can sign up on the 29th, pay a fraction of the subscription tier, snarf all the content on the 30th, then unsubscribe.

Patreon could offer a "only allow patrons access to [certain content] after a full monthly payment has been taken" option but that would be the simple solution...

There are a number of obvious and simple fixes to that problem, but honestly it would be fine to just ignore it. People who are going to "scam" like that are such a teeny tiny fraction of the user base, they're barely worth considering.

Patreon has been doing great; even the porn stars who charge large fees apparently have overwhelmingly honest patrons. It's much more of a theoretical problem than an actual one.