After discovering through another tech YouTuber that PayPal is changing the policy on refunds for the worse (reversed transactions will not reverse the bulk of PayPal’s fees), leaving merchants in the lurch to ultimately pass on that loss to the consumer, it has given me some time to reassess my relationship with PayPal, as well as Patreon since there has been contention there in the past.
However, as I have powered through for alternative means (trashing my Patreon account, attempting to kill my Paypal and currently have a dispute open because of some possibly unknown pending transaction), I realized my plan “B” was not thoroughly researched, and is ending up not fulfilling the primary goal.
Signed up to Ko-fi, and attempted to subscribe to Level1. It directly takes me to Paypal. After a couple needless steps: becoming a gold member and activating Stripe (which only benefits me if I was receiving anything), I found out that Paypal is generally required for payments anyway.
Worse, my setup of Stripe was worse than pointless since it shares the same fee policy for refunds as it is.
I would rather avoid Patreon. I would very much prefer to avoid PayPal. But I still want to access Level1 content (that early and/or exclusive stuff) however it seems like there is a perfect storm of difficulty in doing so.
Ko-fi could improve this by holding a tab (will never be a negative balance; it would be the users responsibility to maintain that balance; it would be Ko-fi’s responsibility to process from that balance even though their main goal is to not be the middle man).
Alternatively, I could send a lump sum via an alternative method (outside of Ko-fi) in lieu of a recurring payment, but the receiving end would manage the accounting back into Ko-fi (essentially how many months that lump sum covers). But I don’t believe either of those are available.
Or I could grumble grumble and return to Patreon, to use their (seemingly) no-hassle PayPal-free methods.
Merch is the way to go. Set yourself a target for each month and then addup the months and buy a thing. BOOM. you are now a supporter and got a free* gift!
Our time with ko-fi may be numbered as well. PayPal seems not to want to support them properly and it negatively impacts other things. About all I can say for now.
This is really quite interesting. I had wondered what the relationship between ko-fi and paypal would turn out as, after observing many of the users of ko-fi.
Patreon has quite a bit of pull, they even managed to get Paypal to lax some of their own policies just for Patreon transactions even.
ko-fi may just be too fast and loose for their liking.
Reviving since I have (mostly) cleaned up how I watch things these days.
I tend to “RSS all the things” at this point, to which I manage my multimedia subscriptions through gPodder (native desktop app; AntennaPod) - once I realized that YouTube channel exports are in an OPML format.
I have had some interest as to how FloatPlane would launch as. I guess it is mostly operated through Plex at this time. However (since I don’t see a site for it, and LMG’s forums are oddly incomplete about it) I have no idea if there is any RSS implementation. Does anyone know if this feature exists?
If that works out, I should be back to supporting (Level1Techs and other) creators between FloatPlane and Flattr.
Floatplane is actually a website that is currently live (I can’t link it, but it’s pretty much the service name + ‘.com’) but unfortunately, it doesn’t support RSS at this time. We could easily add support down the line if there’s enough demand for it, I’m pretty sure.
