Patreon

The short version

Patreon is a paywall with a feed. You post, members pay monthly or yearly to see it, and Patreon takes a cut of everything.

It's the biggest name on this site and the least like a "platform." No monthly fee. No course builder. No gamification. Community means up to ten chat spaces in the app and a Discord hookup. If your product is you, publishing regularly, Patreon is built for exactly that. If your product is a course or a room where members talk to each other, it isn't.

Pricing we checked

Free to start. No plans, no monthly fee. Patreon takes 10% of income from any page published after 4 August 2025. Older pages sit on legacy rates (Founders 5%, Pro 8%, Pro + Merch 11%) until they unpublish, at which point they move to 10% too.

That's the headline. The rest is where it gets expensive.

Transaction fees

10% platform fee, then:

• Processing: 2.9% + 30¢ on cards and Apple Pay anywhere, same on US PayPal and Venmo, 3.9% + 30¢ on non-US PayPal. EUR and GBP cards are 3.4% + 35¢, CAD 3.2% + 35¢.
• Currency conversion: 2.5% whenever a member pays in a currency that isn't your payout currency. On the whole amount, tax included.
• Payouts: $0.25 per US direct deposit. PayPal is 1% per payout, minimum $0.25, capped at $20. Payoneer bank transfer is $0.25 plus a 1.55% conversion if you're paid in USD and bank in something else. Local-currency fees vary; EUR is €0.50 to €1.00 depending on method.
• iOS: Apple takes 30% on in-app purchases. Patreon waives its processing fee there, but the 10% still applies.

Add it up for a creator in Portugal with a $5 tier paid by a US card: 10% platform, 2.9% + 30¢ processing, 2.5% conversion, then a payout fee. Call it 20% gone before it reaches your bank. Patreon's help centre notes payout fees don't show in your earnings dashboard, so you'll find them on your bank statement.

We've entered 10 in the fee filter. It's the only number that's the same for everyone.

Payments

Patreon's own rails, full stop. Cards, Apple Pay, PayPal, Venmo, Sofort, 16-plus currencies. You can't bring your own Stripe. Patreon handles most sales tax collection and remittance, which for a solo creator selling into the EU is worth a lot of the 10%.

Community and gamification

Community chats: up to ten chat spaces, each with a name, topic and emoji, each lockable to specific tiers. Threads, emoji reactions, photos, post previews. Paying members only. The help centre's comparison table says chats are exclusive to the mobile app, so your desktop-only members are out.

Discord: the real community layer for most Patreon creators. Tiers map to Discord roles, members get invited automatically, access is removed when they cancel. Free.

Discourse: Patreon also offers a forum integration with free hosting if you earn $50 a week or more.

Gamification: none. No points, badges, levels or leaderboard.

Notice what's missing. There's no feed where members post. Members comment on your posts, chat in your chat spaces, and talk to each other on Discord. The community is adjacent to Patreon, not inside it.

Courses

No course builder. You can organise posts into Collections and some creators run "courses" that way, which is why we've rated it "Basic" rather than "No." But there's no lesson player, no progress tracking, no completion, no quizzes, no certificates. One-time purchases of digital products exist, with a fee between 5% and 12% depending on your plan.

The three email questions

Does it send members a digest? Not of community activity. Every post can go out by email, either as a preview or the full text, and that default is yours to set per post. Chat activity doesn't get summarised. Rated "Basic notifications."

Can you email your members from inside it? Yes, in two ways. Posts emailed in full are a newsletter in all but name. And Patreon messaging lets you bulk-message members. No sequences, no automation. "Broadcasts only."

Can you get your list out? Yes, CSV from the Relationship Manager, filtered by paid or free, active or cancelled, new this month, with the columns you choose. Any time, no restrictions stated. The native Mailchimp integration is dead: Patreon's own words are "MailChimp no longer supports its integration with Patreon." So it's export and upload, or Zapier. No Kit, no ActiveCampaign.

Getting in and getting out

Members in: You can't import paying members; they have to subscribe. Patreon says it's "testing a way for you to add email contacts to your free membership," which isn't live for everyone. Rated "No."

Members out: CSV, as above. Posts and comments: no export we could find. Your content lives on Patreon's pages.

Courses in: Nothing to import into.

Mobile app

Shared Patreon app on iOS and Android, and for chats it's the only place they work. No branded option.

Who it's for

• Podcasters, writers, artists, anyone whose product is a steady stream of posts.
• Creators who want tax handled and don't want to run a platform.
• Anyone whose community already lives on Discord.

Who should skip it

• Course sellers. There's nothing to put a course in.
• Anyone who wants members talking to each other in a feed with levels and leaderboards. That's Skool, and it's $9.
• Anyone outside the US who's doing the maths on 10% plus conversion plus payout.

Known limitation

10% platform fee plus processing, 2.5% currency conversion and per-payout fees, which the earnings dashboard doesn't show. No course builder, no gamification, community chats are mobile-app only, and the Mailchimp integration has been discontinued.

Sources

Checked 16 Oct 2026 against the Patreon pricing page and these help centre articles: Creator fees overview, A standard platform fee for new creators (effective after August 4, 2025), Community tools for my members, Exporting your audience's emails from Patreon, Control Text Previews for Member Email Notifications. Patreon blocks automated page fetches, so the cover image is the Patreon wordmark rather than a page screenshot.