Offering Annual Memberships for my patrons – Patreon Help Center

We just recently completed our Annual Membership Beta with a handful of creators. In order to make sure we reduce the operational risk (fraud, credit card disputes) from annual membership for creators, we will be slowly rolling out of the feature.

The following criteria below must be met to be eligible for Annual Membership. We'll be working hard to make it available to everyone as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience!

Charge up front
Because Annual Membership locks in the full year’s value of a patron’s pledge upfront, it’s only available to CUF creators. Read more about switching to CUF, to find out if making the switch to this required billing option will work for you.

Monthly
Because Annual Membership is based on a monthly billing cadence (patrons pay for 12 months), creators will need to charge patrons monthly in order to be eligible. Read more about switching to Monthly billing here: Change how I charge my patrons

Payments Risk
Creators will need to have an established payment history on Patreon. Due to the operational risk (fraud, credit card disputes) of a larger payment, we need to ensure creators have a solid history of payments on Patreon before they are eligible. Based on medium and location, this criteria may be subject to more restriction.

The sections below will outline key details about this payment schedule, including: how annual memberships work, refunding annual patrons, and how annual memberships will will be reported. Feel free to skip ahead using the links below, or take a deep dive from start to finish:

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 annual membership
Patrons switching from monthly to annual
Refunding annual patrons
Letting your patrons know you offer annual membership
Frequently asked questions about annual memberships

How does annual billing work?

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 annual membership will automatically renew on the 1st of the month after 12 months from their initial join date 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. Learn more about reviewing your earnings, here: Understanding Your Earnings articles

Setting up Annual Memberships and setting your annual discount

As a creator in our annual memberships 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 to the annual memberships section, where you’ll have the option to opt-in to annual memberships. Once you’ve checked the box, a field will populate where you can set the discount that annual patrons will receive for their commitment.
After selecting annual memberships, you’ll have 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 have 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 Patreon and head to the Getting Paid section of your page editor.
Scroll down and click into the percentage field in the annual memberships 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 section.
A pop-up window will populate 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.

What happens when I opt-out? New patrons will no longer have 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.

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 for annual patrons
Patron manager
Benefits

Relationship manager

When a patron joins a tier with an annual membership, they will be 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 is listed in your “Active” patron list through May 2021. When you download the CSV file of your manager report, Will will be listed 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 find 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 be listed as “Active,” and their “Last charge date” will be the date they joined, or upgraded their membership.

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 need. 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 review 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.

Annual patrons will populate in your monthly benefits just 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
Patronage
Pledge growth

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 be listed, 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. Joe’s payment will be reflected in your August, 2020 Earnings dashboard. 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 review 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:

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.

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?

When you select the option to refund an annual patron, you’ll have the option to refund them the full amount or a partial refund equivalent to the remainder of their pledge price. This option will only be available 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.

Letting your patrons know

Once you've opted into Annual Memberships, we recommend letting your patrons know that they now have the option to switch their membership from monthly to annual. If you’d like to notify your patrons, we’ve put together some suggested messaging you can use to share a post with existing patrons, as well as some suggestions for how to message this across your socials.

Sample post or message copy

Post Title/Subject Line: Pledge annually and save!

Hi everyone,

You can now choose to pay for Patreon on an annual basis. It’s a great way to show your support to me, and in return you’ll get a discount of [x months free] when you do. In addition to reducing transaction fees, you’ll help me create quality content faster and reduce the chance your credit card declines in the future. Optional: Lock in this discount now before it ends!

For existing patrons the following steps will help you switch over your pledge to annual.

Log in, hover over your profile icon in the top right corner, and select Manage Memberships
From your Active Memberships page click Edit next to the pledge you want to change
You’ll see a familiar checkout page where you can select Annual
Click Update. Note: you’ll be charged upfront for the discounted price

New patrons, visit my Patreon page where you’ll see the option below the “Join” button of your chosen tier.

Check out this help center article if you have any questions about how it works.

Sample social copy

Now is a great time to join my Patreon, where you can get [x months free] when you pledge annually! Check it out here [link to creator page].

FAQ

Do my patrons have to pay annually?
Absolutely not! Your patrons get to decide between annual and monthly, and about 1/3 of patrons we surveyed want to pay annually.

What if I prefer monthly payments instead?
Creators who enable Annual Membership haven’t experienced a big decline in monthly revenue, on average less than 5% of monthly payments switch.

What if I change my tiers or content?
Remember, these patrons are the real MVPs and are choosing to support you for a year. They’ll be with you through changes in your offerings and content. And as a backup, refunds are no problem with our prorated refund tool. We recommend communicating any changes you plan with Patrons ahead of time - they appreciate the transparency.

What if patrons cancel in a year?
Patrons are notified before they’re charged again in a year, because no one likes to be caught off guard. Because you’re locking in the value of a whole year upfront, annual patrons are as much as 50% better for your growth, due to monthly patrons cancelling or having a declined payment over the course of a year.

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