We are currently Beta testing Annual memberships, and it is not available to all creators.
If you are in our Annual memberships Beta, this article will outline key details about this payment schedule, including; how annual memberships work, refunding annual patrons, and how annual memberships will look on your earnings reports. Feel free to skip ahead if you know what you’re looking for by clicking the links below, or take a deep dive from the beginning:
- How annual billing works
- Setting up Annual Memberships and setting your annual discount
- Managing annual patrons
- Annual memberships on your Income reports
- Patrons making changes to their membership
- Patrons switching from monthly to annual
- Refunding annual patrons
How does annual billing work?
Annual memberships eligibility
- Annual memberships in beta is only available to creators who have our charge up front billing method enabled. It is not available for per creation and monthly (non-charge up front) billing creators
- Patrons who want to commit to a yearly membership and pay up front if their creator offers annual memberships.
When a patron joins your page with an annual membership, they are paying for an entire year of access up front. This annual up front payment includes, VAT tax, or GST (if applicable). Patrons can start their annual membership at any point, and their term is one year (12 months) from joining.
Their annual membership will automatically renew on the 1st of the month after 12 months have passed.
- Example: A patron starts an annual membership with you on July 8th, 2021. They are charged immediately, and instantly have access to your back catalog of content for their selected tier. Their annual membership will automatically renew on August 1st, 2022, unless they cancel. Their annual charge will occur on the 1st of August every year until they cancel.
As a creator, you will get full payment, minus applicable fees to Patreon, soon after the annual plan has begun.
Setting up Annual Memberships and setting your annual discount
As a creator in our annual memberships beta program, you can opt-in or opt-out of offering annual memberships. You also have the ability to set the discount percentage patrons will receive for joining your membership annually.
To get started, log in to your Patreon account at www.patreon.com, and follow these steps:
- Head to the Getting Paid section of your page editor.
- Scroll until you see the annual memberships beta section. If you’ve been invited to the beta, you’ll see the option to opt-in to annual memberships. Once you’ve checked the box, a field will appear where you can set the discount that annual patrons will receive for their commitment.
- After selecting annual memberships, you’ll see the option to customize the discount percentage patrons will receive when they join annually. The default is 16%, which is 2 months free. While you can set your discount to 0%, we don’t recommend going this route — getting a discount is a huge incentive to commit to membership for a full year*.
* You can offer a maximum of 16% off the annual price of memberships. - Once you’ve set your discount percentage, scroll up and click save changes to launch annual memberships as an option for new patrons.
Once you’ve enabled annual memberships, patrons will see the option “or pay annually” on all of your tiers.
Making changes to your annual memberships discount percentage
You can update the discount percentage you offer new patrons at any point. Please note that any changes will be available to new patrons. Once a patron has locked in their annual membership with you at a certain price, that price cannot be changed.
To change your annual discount percentage:
- Log in to www.patreon.com and head to the Getting Paid section of your page editor.
- Scroll down and click into the percentage field in the annual memberships beta section of the page.
- Click save changes.
Opting-out of annual memberships
We don’t recommend that creator’s opt-out of annual memberships once it’s enabled. If you want to keep offering annual memberships for patrons, but don’t want to offer a discounted price for future annual patrons, you can set the percentage to 0%. However, if you do need to opt-out of offering annual memberships, follow the steps below:
- Log in to your creator page at www.patreon.com and head to the Getting Paid section of your page editor.
- Scroll down and deselect the checkbox in the annual memberships beta section.
- A pop-up window will appear asking you to confirm the change. Click stop accepting annual memberships.
- If you wish to opt-out of offering annual memberships for patrons click save changes.,
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What happens when I opt-out? New patrons will no longer see the option to join annually. Existing annual patrons’ remain annual patrons until they cancel. Their memberships will auto-renew at the annual price they joined.
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Managing annual patrons
This section will walk you through these 3 Patron management tools, and how they will be affected by patrons with an annual membership:
Relationship manager
When a patron joins a tier with an annual membership, they will appear as an active patron in your Relationship manager for the entire year, and as long as they keep their membership.
- Example: Will joins your tier at $28.80 for an annual membership on May 3rd, 2020. Will populates in your Relationship Manager as an “Active” patron as soon as their payment processes. Will appears in your “Active” patron list through May 2021. When you download the CSV file of your manager report, you’ll see Will as “Active” during that year, with a “Last charge date” of May 3rd, 2020.
You can filter patrons by “Charge frequency” in your Relationship manager to see which patrons are on an annual membership versus a monthly membership plan.
When you download the CSV version of this page, patrons with an annual membership will appear as “Active,” and their “Last charge date” will be the date they joined, or upgraded their membership.
Patron manager
Annual patrons will appear as “Processed” in your Patron manager for each month that they are active, however they won’t be paying you each month since they’ve paid in advance for the year’s membership. You can filter patrons by “Charge frequency,” to see monthly versus annual memberships.
- Important Note: if you currently use the older version of the PM, you’ll want to refer to the newer version of the Patron manager to filter by monthly and annual patrons.
If you download the Patron manager report and plug it into another software, please note that we’ve added a column, “Charge frequency,” to the CSV report. Column “O” is “Charge frequency,” and column “P” is now “Complete” on the updated CSV report.
Filtering annual and monthly patrons
Your CSV can be used to measure the success of patrons choosing annual membership vs. monthly membership. Here’s how you can split monthly and annual charges within your CSV:
- Download the CSV from your Relationship manager
- Click the dropdown arrow in the Charge Frequency column
- Select Quick Filter > choose annual or monthly
This will show you all annual or all monthly charges depending on what you’d like to see. Next, you will filter by the date the patron joined:
- Filter the Patronage Since Date column by selecting the dropdown arrow and choosing Sort Descending.
You can now see your list of new annual or monthly memberships for any given month.
Benefits being managed
If you have any benefits that you are managing on Patreon, patrons with annual memberships will immediately be added to benefit lists that they may be eligible for as soon as they confirm their membership.
You’ll see annual patrons reappear in your monthly benefits just like you would monthly patrons – since they’ve paid for the year in full, they’ll be eligible for any benefits you offer for that year.
Annual memberships on my Income reports
In this section, we’ll dive into how your Income dashboards will be effected by your annual memberships. We’ll walk through the following Income pages of the site:
Earnings Dashboard
When a patron joins one of your tiers with an annual membership, their payment will be available to you in the month that they join. The earnings from their annual payment will appear, in full, in the month that they joined as well, and will not be reflected in other months within the year.
- Example: Joe joins your tier at $19.20 for an annual membership on August 5th, 2020, and is charged immediately. You will see Joe’s payment reflected in your August, 2020 Earnings report. While Joe will be an active patron through August 2021, his payment of $19.20 will only be reported in the month his payment processed – August 2020.
Patronage Dashboard
Patrons with an annual membership will be counted as a “New,” patron on your Patronage dashboard, in the month that their payment processes. After their initial sign up month, they will no longer be counted as a “New” or “Paying” patron on your Patronage page. This is done to avoid potential confusion about earnings when compared to your Patronage page.
- Example: Sally joins your tier at $9.60 for an annual membership on January 13th, 2020. On your Patronage dashboard, Sally will be represented in the “New Paying Patrons” column of your Patronage page for January 2020. After that she will no longer be accounted for on your Patronage dashboard.
If you download the CSV of your Patronage dashboard, Sally’s “Date Payment Succeeded,” will show as 2020-01-13, the date that Sally paid their annual membership.
- You can see a patrons’ full payment history from your Relationship Manager page.
Pledge Growth Dashboard
Annual memberships will be reflected as a “New pledge” in the month that the patron joined and then as an “Active patron” every month after while their membership is active.
What happens when a patron edits their membership?
Patron increases their annual membership (joins a higher tier)
If a patron increases their annual membership, a pro-rated credit from their initial charge will be applied to the new amount and they’ll be charged the difference between the two tiers.
Examples:
Examples:
- A patron paid for your $120 tier and upgrades in the same month to your $140 tier, they are immediately charged $20 for the difference between the two.
- A patron paid $120 in April and upgrades in June to your $140 tier, only $110 from their initial pledge is left and would make their charge to upgrade $30.
In both of the above examples, when their membership automatically renews in a year, they’ll be charged their new membership amount of $140, in full.
Patron decreasing their annual membership (wants to switch to a lower tier)
At the moment, patrons will not be able to lower their annual membership.
Patrons switching from monthly to annual
Your monthly patrons can make the switch to an annual membership at any point. We've created this help guide that you can send existing patrons to help them make the switch: Switching from monthly to annual membership
Patrons will be charged for the entire year up front at the yearly price you've set.
Patrons will be charged for the entire year up front at the yearly price you've set.
Refunding annual memberships
If for any reason, you would like to refund a patron’s annual membership, you can do so by following this directions outlined in this help guide: Refunding annual patrons
Can I issue partial refunds?
Can I issue partial refunds?
When you select the option to refund an annual patron, you’ll see the option to refund them the full amount or a partial refund equivalent to the remainder of their pledge price. This option will only appear for annual patrons, as partial refunds is not an option for monthly billed patrons at this time.
If I refund an annual membership, will the patron still have access?
- If you refund the patron’s full payment: If you refund any amount to an annual patron they will immediately lose access to your patron-only content for their tier level — they’ve essentially discontinued their annual membership via refund. They can repledge if they’d like, however, they’ll be charged their new membership amount and terms.
- If you refund the patron’s remaining pledge amount: Since the partial refund includes the remaining pledge (not including the month you refund in), after you refund the patron will have access to their membership for the remainder of the month. Their membership is essentially terminated in the following month.
Note: Patreon reserves the right to remove funds from a creator’s balance under certain circumstances, for example, where the money was not intended to be pledged by the patron, or if we have reason to suspect fraud, other illegalities, or violations of our Terms of Use. We also reserve the right to change the disbursement schedule to mitigate risk, or to terminate the program after honoring the existing plans.