Patreon's published fee tables price its cut down to the cent

The setup

Patreon is a subscription-membership platform many VTubers use alongside YouTube or Twitch's native tools, charging creators a platform fee on top of payment processing costs rather than taking a cut from the fan's side of a payment. Patreon's own Creator fees overview, as retrieved on 16 September 2026, is the platform's current statement of that fee structure; a companion page on the standard platform fee documents a specific policy: creators who publish a new page after 4 August 2025 are placed on a standard 10% plan, while creators published on or before that date keep whatever plan they already had.

What the documents show

The fees overview lists three legacy platform-fee tiers still running alongside the new standard rate: a 5% Founders rate, unavailable to new creators since 7 May 2019; an 8% Pro rate and an 11% Pro plus Merch rate, both closed to new creators after 4 August 2025. On top of whichever platform fee applies, Patreon charges separate payment processing fees that vary by method and region, 2.9% plus $0.30 for a US credit-card payment on the standard plan, rising to 3.9% plus $0.30 for non-US PayPal, plus a 2.5% currency-conversion fee when a fan pays in a currency different from the creator's payout currency. The standard-fee page adds a hard deadline: creators still on old per-creation billing must move to subscription billing by 1 November 2026 or Patreon will pause their billing and migrate them automatically. Separately, both pages confirm that purchases made through Patreon's iOS app pass through Apple's in-app purchase system, which applies a 30% App Store fee on top of Patreon's own platform fee.

The craft

For a creator deciding where to route Patreon links, the documented fee stack means directing fans to a web checkout rather than the iOS app avoids Apple's additional 30%, since Patreon states purchases completed on mobile web are not subject to that fee. Pricing a membership tier near the $3 mark also matters, since Patreon's own tables use that figure as the boundary separating micropayment processing rates from standard ones on legacy plans, a pricing decision the fee tables make directly comparable across currencies.

Keeping the creator in control

Because legacy pricing survives only as long as a page stays continuously published, even a brief unpublish moves a creator permanently to the standard 10% rate, the documentation effectively locks in a fee structure the moment a creator's page goes live and penalizes routine account maintenance that involves unpublishing. That is a direct reading of Patreon's own policy, not an inference, and worth flagging before pausing or restructuring a page.

• Which platform-fee tier is this Patreon page actually on, and would unpublishing it forfeit that rate?
• How much of monthly Patreon income currently goes to payment processing versus the platform fee itself?
• Does directing fans away from the iOS app meaningfully change take-home revenue?

Patreon's fee documentation is unusually granular for a creator platform, exact percentages, exact per-currency processing add-ons, exact dates, which makes it one of the few monetization pages in this space where a creator can compute a real take-home rate without guessing.