TL;DR – We’re leaving Patreon, but will set up subscription options soon on the site for those who still want to get all of our content, including bonus puzzles and e-books.

Dear supporters of GMPuzzles,

This December marks the fifth anniversary of GMPuzzles (my first business plan went out on 12/12/12 at 12:12:12). We’ve recently been planning for 2018, including how to expand our team of editors to be able to release more puzzles, online and in books, next year. I’ll share more of these plans with you in the coming weeks.

As part of our updates for 2018, we have been thinking about changing our use of Patreon. While the site was a great forum for us to start encouraging donations/subscriptions to our web page and books in 2014, it didn’t come with all the features that we expected. For example, Patreon does not limit access to “bonus” content based on the time you joined or paid for posts. What this means is that if a new patron joined, they would suddenly have access to every extra puzzle ever shared (and before the new donor ever paid, so they could also then download everything and cancel still without paying). We mentioned the problem; Patron did not seem to think it was a problem or worth fixing. This turned Patreon into more of an email-list building tool for us, as I did not feel comfortable posting bonus content on their site.

And as an email-list builder, here we were also disappointed that they have been particularly bad in sharing feedback on when someone ends a pledge or their payments stop processing for months at a time. It has taken lots of extra clicks and list checking to maintain, far more time than is necessary.

With that already on our mind, this week Patreon announced they were updating their fee process. I don’t know what our patrons received exactly, but what I got as a creator gave a very misleading sense of a benefit for me of getting 95% of what is pledged. Up to now, we have regularly kept ~85% of the pledged amount after fees. The new changes really affect smaller recurring pledges and the math will give us just over 75% after ~25% in fees and services charges. Since they process fees once a month, I would expect there are economies of scale from grouping an individual’s payments, but instead this change is applied to each and every post. Worst of all, the fees are being directly applied to our patrons, changing the pledges they had been expecting to give, from $1 or $1.50 per week to $1.38 or $1.89, with no option for us to absorb the loss as we have been in the past. This isn’t the first time Patreon payment changes have caused headaches (sometime 6-18 months ago there was a silent cap of $1 per pledge added which broke our lower reward levels without communication which we patched earlier this year). As we look towards our future in 2018 and beyond, we’ve decided that we should no longer connect our work with the site.

So I’m ending our connection with Patreon this week, and will not charge any patrons again for future weeks of posts. There are two more weeks of puzzles planned in 2017 and I will be sharing them with our past supporters of the site at no charge. Entering 2018, I expect to set up a payment system with PayPal where anyone can subscribe for several months or a year at a time. We’ll modify some of the rewards for this one-size-fits-all approach, but expect a similar mix of early puzzle receipt, solution files, bonus puzzles, and e-books as in the past. This new set-up will also greatly reduce our fees and whatever we set up will make sure we do actually keep 95% or more of what you intend to contribute as a supporter of GMPuzzles. For those that don’t have any money to support us and get this bonus content, we will still have free puzzles here throughout the year.

A new week of puzzles is coming Monday.

Best,
Thomas