When you start your Patreon, you unlock free tools to grow your community, customize your Patreon to your unique brand and perspective, and share your work with fans. When you're ready to grow your business, you can sell digital products via Commerce or add paid membership offerings.
Welcome fans to your community
Patreon is a free space for you to connect directly with your fans. Since there aren’t any algorithms that prioritize advertisers, you know what you share will be seen by the people you want to see it.
Members get access to your community through new work, comments on posts they have access to, and even community chat spaces if they join a paid offering. Members get email notifications directly to their inbox, the Patreon app, and on the web, so they never miss an update.
By default, people who visit your Patreon will see the option to Join for free. When you add paid memberships, you can decide if you want free and paid options prominently visible on your Patreon or if you’d prefer to show only paid options when people first visit your page. If you add paid memberships and your content is 18+, then people who visit your page will only see the option to Become a member, with paid options being prominent on your Patreon.
Share your work through posts
Fill your Patreon with at least one post (e.g., a piece of bonus content) set as Public to let visitors know what you’re all about. Making your post visible to everyone ensures that anyone who’s interested in your Patreon can see it, and it gets fans excited about what you’re sharing on Patreon.
Members are notified about posts visible to Public and can access them directly from their inbox, the desktop app, the mobile app, and on mobile web.
How to publish a Public post
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Make sure you follow this guide while in your creator profile. You can switch to your creator profile by clicking on your name in the bottom-left corner of the home screen and selecting your Creator profile from the menu
- Click the Create button
from the left navigation, or on your page — If you also sell digital products, you’ll want to choose the Post option
- Choose what you’re creating from the post type dialog. If you'd like to open your draft in another tab, you can right-click or ctrl+click and select Open in another tab
- You’ll want to give your post a title (required) and upload your media files, or type up your post
- Click the Next button
- Under Who can see this post? choose the Public option
- Optional post extras:
- Disable comments — If you’ve given members comment access, you can disable comments on a post-by-post basis
- Schedule post for a later time — Great if you have a posting calender, so you can queue up your posts
- Add tags — Tags live under the Collections tab on your Patreon
- Add your post to an existing or new collection to make it easier for members to discover your posts
- Publish or Schedule your post
- Click the Create button
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Make sure you follow this guide while in your creator profile. You can switch to your creator profile by tapping your profile picture in the top right corner of the home screen and tapping on Switch to creator profile.
- Tap the Create button
from the bottom menu bar
- Give your post a title (required) and upload your media, type your text, or paste your link
- When you start typing in the text field, a text editing menu will appear at the bottom of the screen
- Tap on the Who can see this post field and choose Public
- Add your post to an existing or new collection to make it easier for members to discover your posts
- Optional post extras:
- Schedule post for a later time — Great if you have a posting calendar, so you can queue up your posts
- Add tags — Tags live under the Collections tab on your Patreon
- Tap the Next link
- Your post will publish or will be scheduled if you select the ‘schedule post’ option
- Tap the Create button
Add monetization options
Whether you want to sell digital products to customers or get recurring revenue through paid memberships, we’ve got you covered with tools to help you decide how you want to get paid.
Offer paid membership
Adding paid offerings to your Patreon lets you build your community into a sustainable business to help financially support your work. Visit our guide to adding paid offerings to your page to learn more about how to enable paid membership.
Once you create paid options, you can decide whether you want to prominently show both your free and paid options to visitors or if you prefer to prominently show your paid options only.
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Free and paid options displayed: If your Patreon is suitable for all audiences, a ‘Join for free’ button will be displayed on your Patreon, with your paid offerings displayed. You can make the free option less prominent on your page by choosing the paid options only in your page settings.
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Paid options only: If you’ve selected the paid options only setting, your Patreon is not suitable for all audiences, or you are earning through custom payments but haven’t set up paid tiers yet, a ‘Become a member’ button will be displayed on your Patreon along with your tiers. This button will only lead to your paid offerings.
Fans can still access the option to join for free if they click on the menu “…” on your page. Additionally, fans can stay connected as free members when they cancel their paid membership. 80% of paid members who cancel opt to stay connected as free members.
Resources for paid membership
- 5 steps to define your goals — and actually achieve them
- How to structure your membership and price your benefits
- How to combine exclusive content and community to delight your fans
Sell digital products
You can sell digital products like videos, podcast episodes, images, and other files directly to customers, whether they’re a member or not, through Commerce. Our commerce tools let you sell digital products on your Shop tab and give you powerful insights into customer behavior and your earnings growth over time.
Selling digital products is great if you have a collection of capstone work that you want to release and get paid for, if you want to open another revenue stream, or if you want your work to be available for purchase by anyone, whether they’re a member or not. Visit our guide for selling products to learn more about how to get started with Commerce.
Tools for community
Community Chats
Available to all creators who offer paid tiers, you can create up to ten chat spaces for your paid members.
A community chat is a space for group conversation among your Patreon community, helping you foster deeper connections among your members beyond the comment section. These improved chat features make it easier than ever to connect with your members and allow them to build relationships with one another.
Get started with chat
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Desktop/Mobile web: Click/tap the Community tab
from the left-hand menu and select Create
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App: Tap on the Community tab
the bottom menu bar, and tap the + to create a new chat space.
Integrate Patreon with other community tools
In addition to Community Chats on Patreon, you can seamlessly integrate other community tools like Discord and Discourse, with your Patreon.
Learn about community tools you can integrate with on Patreon.
Comment settings
Comment settings help you manage your community engagement across your posts on Patreon. Here are the different ways that you can adjust your comment settings for your community:
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Comment access: You can Allow comments or Turn off comments for all of your posts from your page settings
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Comment filtering: With comment filtering, we’ll automatically hide comments made by free members that don’t meet our Community Guidelines or are potentially harmful to your community. Filtering is enabled by default, and you can adjust the level of filtering you’d prefer or disable filtering entirely from your page settings
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Disable comments for posts: If you give members comment access, you’ll still be able to disable comments for individual posts from the post creation or editing flow
- Reporting a guidelines violation: We encourage you to review our Community Guidelines and report any inappropriate behavior to help keep our community safe. If a member’s comment violates the guidelines, you can report them by clicking the “...” button and selecting Report this content. Please include in the report as much evidence as possible (e.g. screenshots, URLs, etc.).
Measure and grow
You can see who joins your community and member details like join date, membership tier, and total amount paid in the Relationship Manager. You can see your overall growth and drill into the data for free and paid members using filters in Insights.
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Your Post dashboard daily post impressions, post page traffic sources, and likes and impressions for your most recent 15 posts. Learn more about your Posts Dashboard
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When viewing a post on your page or directly on the post page, you can open the insights dialog for any post by clicking on the More insights
button in the right corner of the post
- You’ll see overall post impressions, members who liked the post, and members who commented on the post
FAQ
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Patreon offers tools to help you get paid whenever it feels right for you. There’s no obligation to offer paid membership when you start your journey on Patreon.
There are multiple ways to get paid when you’re ready:
- You can also sell digital products through Commerce - learn more about Commerce
- Adding a paid membership to your page - learn more about adding paid membership to your Patreon
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Ultimately, you know yourself and your business goals best. Adding a paid membership might be right for you if:
- You create consistent digital or tangible work that you can offer fans regularly
- You’re making exclusive work or work that you want your most dedicated fans to have access to regularly
- You make episodic work (think podcast series or if you’re writing a book)
There are a ton of unique benefits that work great with paid membership. If you think you’re ready to take the next step in your journey, we’ve created a guide on how to structure your membership and price your benefits to help you get started.
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We consider your Patreon to fall into one of two categories: “Safe for All Audiences” or “Adult/18+” because the payment processors we rely on to get creators paid require this distinction.
The “Adult/18+” category is for your Patreon if one or more works (audio, text, or visual, including depictions of human beings and animations) contain sexually explicit content or nudity. Visit our Should my Patreon be marked Safe for All Audiences or Adult/18+ article to learn which categorization is best for you.
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Share your Patreon with your online community via social networks or with family and friends. If you have a podcast or video channel, you can thank your members or link to your Patreon where fans can join your community.
We’ve got great tips for growing your audience and promoting your Patreon in our Creator Hub.