Closing my Patreon creator account

written on Friday, January 10, 2025

I have been running a Patreon creator account for a few years now. I finally decided to close it. In this article I want to explain why I made this decision.

It does not really work for me

I can't say I have a massive number of supporters: I had 3 at some point but now I am down to only 1.

I think there are at least 3 reasons for that:

• I don't spend enough time producing content for the account. I post a monthly update of what I have been doing during the last month and what I plan to do on the next one. That's it.

• My work is done in the open, so I can't really offer member-exclusive content. Even my monthly update is replicated on my blog and on Ko-fi. That reduces the incentive to join.

• My open-source work is varied: I write games, CLI tools, GUI apps… I don't think this way of working fits the Patreon model well.

I don't really need it

I am lucky enough to have a stable day job. I don't need Patreon supporters to put food on the table. It would make more sense to have a Patreon if I were to go back to reducing my day job to 4 or 3 days a week. I am reluctant to do that at the moment.

Morale obligation

If I get a recurrent donation, I consider I owe supporters regular work: they deserve to get something back for the money they give to me every month.

This is different from one-time donations: I interpret these as a "thank you" for something I have produced in the past, whereas a recurring donation is for work supporters (rightfully) expect me to produce in the future.

I want to write more

I enjoy writing, but I have limited time to do so. Writing monthly updates sounded like something that would not take long, but it quickly became a time-consuming chore. Looking back at my blog entries for the last two years, most of them are either release announcements or monthly updates (which sometimes double as release announcements).

That chore feeling probably shows: if it was painful to write, it's most likely painful to read.

Moving on

If you read this on Patreon, this should be the last post there. I have nothing against Patreon, it's a great platform and I continue to use it to support other creators. It's just not the right tool for me at the moment.

For the same reason, I have disabled my GitHub sponsor account.

The support page on my site is still there, so you can still support me with one-time donations.