So: I talked to Patreon about moving.

We had a few calls, and they sent me a proposal. (Because the thing none of the people who've made the move are allowed to say is that yes, most of them are being compensated!)

Honestly, in a lot of ways, Patreon would be a better fit for the weird business I've found myself building here. Allowing people to pay a one-time fee to access a video — or a specific group of videos — might be really helpful. Being able to host a special program on one platform instead of promoting it on Substack, selling it on Stripe, distributing the materials on Google Drive, and hosting a community on Slack (🫠) would be really nice. And having actual human-being contacts and some sort of influence on product decisions for the platform I'm using would be amazing. (Also between the N*zis and An*rew T*te, there's a lot to not love around here.)

But as a subscriber to a few newsletters that have moved to Patreon, honestly, the user experience kind of sucks! It's clunky and old fashioned, and I interact with their work and communities far less than I did when they were here on Substack.

The offer they sent me was fine (not huge, but fine), but there's a major risk that a lot of my paid subscribers wouldn't make the move with me — I could easily see myself making less money in two years, when they stop paying me, than I'm making now. They certainly don't take a smaller cut from users than Substack and Stripe do.

Plus, if I ever decided to leave Patreon, I'd have to make all my subscribers manually change to another platform, AGAIN. (As of now, if I wanted to leave Substack for another platform that uses Stripe, I'm pretty sure my subscribers wouldn’t have to do anything different to keep paying.)

And probably the most important thing is: I actually do not think the solution to building a sustainable independent media brand is to put all your eggs into any individual basket (aka platform). I think it's probably more about first and foremost focusing on quality, but then right behind that, diversifying revenue streams and having really good backup plans for when certain things inevitably stop working. All platforms are bad! None of them is your savior.

I may actually try using Patreon for my special programs at some point, just to see. There's no rule that you can't do both! And I’m certainly still reading everything I can about Ghost and Beehiv. But for now, How to Move is staying here.