We're sorry, and we're not rolling out the fees change - <AUTHOR> https://blog.patreon.com/not-rolling-out-fees-change/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a remarkably direct and appropriate apology, along with an appropriate response, a rare thing indeed.

If not for their _initial_ response to the first round of feedback, namely to put a "we're still doing it" at the bottom of their original blog post (with completely unreasonable and unjustified explanations for _why_ ), I'd give them full credit for responding appropriately. As it is, though, at least they fixed this. They're still going to need to deal with the giant pile of patrons they drove off; many people lost a significant fraction of their support because of this change, and that won't necessarily come back.

Between 1 and 2 years ago, I talked to some folks at Patreon about an unrelated topic (namely, trying to use Patreon for registered charities). They mentioned at that time that they had a change in the works to shift processing fees from creators to patrons, which they said at the time would be "better for creators" for various reasons, but that didn't want to talk about the details yet. (Since the issue is now public, I don't see any issue with saying that now.) That discussion naturally didn't include any information about fee structure or un-aggregation of charges with associated additional fees, e.g. the "$1 costs $1.37" problem, since that wasn't the topic; the impression they gave at the time was that the only change was to pass on the (presumably still aggregated) fees to the patrons, which wouldn't have been as serious a problem, and wouldn't have killed Patreon's suitability as a wildly successful microtransaction platform the way this change did. So, they've been thinking about this for a _long_ time, and yet they sprung it on people without warning and without running the _full_ details by anyone.

Update: there's now a survey from Patreon asking for feedback: [https://twitter.com/Patreon/status/941010263385374720](https://twitter.com/Patreon/status/941010263385374720)

<comment><USER3> I understand why they do it: they trying to bring down transaction costs with payment processors. These fees on small amounts is death by thousand cuts.

But, I believe, there is a way: they can introduce wallets for $1-2 patrons: put $10 in a single transaction, then charge the wallet once it is a time to pay to creator. This should aggregate small transactions into larger ones and significantly cut the costs.

<comment><USER4> Maybe it's just me, but, I think it's _so fucking stupid_ that it costs money (which goes to private businesses) to spend money in the modern world.

(and no, bitcoin doesn't fix that at all)

I think if we were in an alternate universe where the government managed a free utility for digital payments no one would find it strange for a second.

<comment><USER5> It has always costed money to to spend money and there are pros and cons to each method. All that stuff isn't free even if it isn't directly measurable most of the time.

Cash costs money too--you have to count it, handle it, deposit it, protect it from theft, verify it's authenticity, make sure you have enough change, spend time counting change, etc. As a consumer, if a merchant fucks you over you have little recourse besides suing. Cash takes no time to clear so you can spend it right after getting it, it is anonymous, it is hard to trace so you can skip on taxes, etc.

Checks can bounce, you have to deposit them, they take time to clear, they take forever to write, they can be fake, etc. However, it is hard for your cashiers to skim off the top, it uses exact amounts so no change to keep, it is a single slip of paper to carry around instead of a pocket of paper currency, as a consumer you can stop payment on a check if the merchant fucks you over, etc...

Credit cards are super quick to use at the register. They don't require any change (unless handing cash back). As a consumer, if a merchant fucks you over you can issue a chargeback. It is easy to track your spending as a consumer because all transactions are recorded electronically. As a merchant you don't have to handle change or cash, your cashiers can't easily skim off the top, etc...

It's all trade offs and I'll bet if you did an NPV on all the different methods taking into consideration all their pros and cons, they'd all wind up "costing" similar amounts.

<comment><USER6> >Credit cards are super quick to use at the register.

At least they used to be. Chips ruined that. Now I have to stand there staring at the screen for half a minute waiting to respond to prompts and to pull the card out at the end. For most transactions, cash is probably faster than using a chip.

<comment><USER7> Where are you, out of curiousity? I find most of the chips are no slower than using a swipe card was before.

<comment><USER8> I lived in Spain for a year, and everyone had chips there. My US card always drew eyerolls as they had to find the /old/ machine and dust it off and find someone who remembered how to use it. I was excited that we were getting chips here in the US, but of course they fucked it up and for whatever reason it takes ages for your chip to be read, and there are frequent chip read errors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _> Many of you lost patrons, and you lost income._

I think Jack at Patreon fundamentally misunderstood the _nature of the relationship_ between patron and creator. A lot of patrons feel like their payment is a _donation_ instead of paying a subscription or water bill. Yes, some patrons+creators have a quid-pro-quo arrangement where payments unlocks content or extra services. However, many payments are just "appreciation" type of money. That is a _fragile relationship_ and it was wrong to tamper with it by charging extra fees to the patron.

Jack was/is a creator himself so he should have known this dynamic and therefore predicted the bad outcome ahead of time.

Ideally, when you start a multi-sided platform, you want to get the economics correct from the very beginning so you can leave it unchanged. (E.g. Apple iTunes charges 30% since 2008 and it's stayed that way.) However, if you have to readjust the percentages, it's preferable to take it out on the sellers' side and not the buyers' side. When ebay started, the fees for sellers were ~3.25%. Over the last 10 years, it has crept up in increments to ~10%. All of those price increases were absorbed by the sellers.

If Patreon needs more than 5% to make the numbers work for a sustainable business, they need to take it from the creators and not the patrons. Patreon was riding on the "good will" of patrons making voluntary payments. It was a terrible miscalculation to destroy that good will and nickel & dime patrons with extra fees.

<comment><USER10> > ebay started, the fees for sellers were ~3.25%. Over the last 10 years, it > has crept up in increments to ~10%. All of those price increases were > absorbed by the sellers.

Isn't this a false dichotomy? It's just a matter of how you phrase it, no?

If the increase in seller fees is reflected in real pricepoints on eBay's market, it could work out as it really being the buyers paying the difference.

<comment><USER9> _> If the increase in seller fees is reflected in real pricepoints on eBay's market, it could work out as it really being the buyers paying the difference._

That would be true but that didn't happen. Final ebay auction values for stable items (e.g. books) did not rise by +7%. The sellers really did end up paying most of the fee increases.

Yes, some sellers tried to claw back the extra fee commission by adding extra "handling charges" to the total. That had limited effect because it made prices higher than (1) other ebay sellers that didn't add handling fees and (2) competitive Amazon Marketplace prices.

Also, Ebay lets bidders sort search results by _" total price including shipping & handling"_ so adding handling fees just pushes your items down to the bottom of the list.

<comment><USER11> I don't get this. Eventually, it is just taking a cut from a transaction. What does even mean the seller is paying for it or the buyer?

Let's say the final price is 100$ and cut is 10%, so seller gets 90$ and buyer pays 100$. You could say the buyer is paying for it since the seller was willing to sell for 90$ and the buyer had to add 10$ to get the item. Or you could say the seller pays for it, since the buyer was willing to buy for 100$ and the seller has to give up on 10$ out of those 100$.

I really don't see the difference. It seems just marketing in terms of how you phrase it. I even saw companies saying things like: seller is paying 5% and buyer 5%, which seems just a way to make it look lower for both sides.

<comment> T-Winsnes The difference is when the cut increases, but the overall price does not. Buyer still pays $100, but seller only get $80

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's hard to believe that Patreon didn't ask for feedback on this model initially. I'm sure they did, but my guess is that they didn't expect the blowback from people that depended on $1-2 patrons to have such a large impact on their image.

IMO, before Twitter/Facebook, this apology would've never happened. They would've continued to press on with their fee structure and it would've been yesterday's news.

The real question is - is this still a good move for them? Or should they have dealt with the blowback either way?

<comment><USER13> > It's hard to believe that Patreon didn't ask for feedback on this model > initially.

From their initial blog post announcing this change:

> In preparation for this change, we ran experiments and months and months of > research to understand patrons' potential reactions and we found that many > patrons were happy knowing that this change will send more money to > creators.

Looks like a somewhat interesting user-testing glitch to me. Perhaps their sample of patrons wasn't representive, or when you sit people down and discuss a new feature 1-1 you can be more convincing than when broadcasting it to the whole world in a blog post.

<comment><USER14> Well, something that's gotten elided in a lot of the outrage is that moving the transaction fees from the creators to the patrons would have given creators 3-5% more money on the same amount of pledges. And while it seems "no duh" to point out that a $5 pledge is literally worth five times what a $1 pledge is, in terms of _revenue,_ that means that many creators could have lost a surprising number of $1 pledges and still come out even (or even slightly ahead). I ran the numbers for several Patreons, big and small, based on what I could scour from Graphtreon, and the amount of money _most_ creators lost over the last few days would have been largely offset by the money they'd get back.

I'm not saying that this makes the change a good idea, or that it was communicated well, or that there aren't some really interesting business dynamics that are likely to come up one way or the other that will piss off creators. (There are only _six_ creators on Patreon who have more than 10,000 patrons as of now; to earn that $450M valuation, Patreon may need creators who have hundreds of thousands of patrons.) I'm just not convinced this would have been the Patreoncalypse.

<comment><USER15> If patrons on average adjusted their pledges under the new fee structure such that they were paying about as much money as they were before, creators would end up with less money on average, because the new de-aggregated fee structure results in higher fees as a percentage of the total amount paid in almost all cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Aggregation is highly-valued, and we underestimated that.

To me, at least, this is the core issue. Patreon is supposed to be the way to support creators in the internet age.

If they're going to make a strong many-to-many funding model impractical, then why should anyone put money into them as opposed to conventional charities? An NPR pledge drive will sign me up for a credit card monthly auto-payment, but that just doesn't really get me excited. Sure, it's a good cause, but good causes have always been around.

This is critical because of the fact that so many of the creators are actually doing bleeding-edge things. The tiny sub-categories of creators I fund didn't exist 3 years ago. A $1 donation isn't just a signal from the supporter to the creator. It's a signal to the media, it's a signal for potential book deals, all kinds of things. Those numbers have value. By making those contributions radically financially inefficient, they are risking a tipping point that undermines their core value proposition. Even worse, it hurts the frontiers of creation that we cared about in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER17> Well at least LiberaPay got their minute of fame from this fiasco. Their stats shot through the roof. [https://liberapay.com/about/stats](https://liberapay.com/about/stats)

<comment><USER18> Hopefully folks continue to migrate to them. It's pretty clear Patreon is only looking out for themselves at this point, and the "sudden" change in direction is because their bank account started to bleed.

<comment><USER19> Every enterprise has to earn a decent amount of money to survive, let alone succeed in a financial way. They'd just start out as a NGO otherwise.

WRT dumping Patreon and the like, I'd rather see community-efforts and enterprise compete. That has lead to some very high quality products from both (e.g. clang vs. gcc, chrome vs. firefox).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I doubt it was the feedback that they heard. I think it was the money.

I'm willing to bet that this rollback is because Patreon leadership and Sr. Managers woke up Monday morning, took a look at their metrics and KPIs and nearly had a heart attack. It probably looks like a nice upward trend for a long time then a massive spike down after the announcement.

Always follow the money.

<comment><USER21> Not sure it was graphs. I think #4 creator Amanda Palmer posting in open revolt asking her patrons to sign up for email so they could follow her somewhere else might have helped:

[https://www.patreon.com/posts/15819420](https://www.patreon.com/posts/15819420)

It turns out the whales remember when they were minnows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> While I like that they are walking these back, I have a feeling that people who lost a lot of supporters won't see a 100% recovery.

I only lost a few, but it already has me poking around at different options for the future.

<comment><USER21> > I only lost a few, but it already has me poking around at different options > for the future.

Same here. Nobody is going to trust Patreon not to do something equally damaging again. It's nice they've reversed this, but I really can't think of anything that will bring back the trust they just trashed.

<comment><USER23> From the contributor end, I no longer trust Patreon. Their announcement email was way too much obfuscation and didn't include the bottom line up front: that my $X/mo pledges would cost me an additional service fee starting January 1, and that I would automatically be levied these fees.

<comment><USER24> That is entirely my issue with it too. They said that creators would start getting almost all of the pledged money instead of just a share of it; what they "forgot" to mention is that this is purely because they redefined what a pledge means. They silently redefined it from "the amount of money I pay per month" to "the amount of money I pay per month minus fees".

Creators would get more money of course, but purely because all patreons would start paying more money. They didn't mention that either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is an admirable response, but I feel like Patreon is just one of the first approaches towards getting rid of the advertising revenue models so prevalent on the internet today, which should definitely be our goal. We can't allow greedy advertisers to hijack online services, as is the current case for YouTube.

I hope that in the future content creators won't have to depend on a single company which takes decisions purely based on their own profit. The marketing team can spin this anyway they want, but ultimately as a company that is their goal.

For lack of a better term, microtransactions and some form of digital currency should solve this problem.

I'm not a fan of the Brave browser, but they introduced a micropayment system last year[0]. It seems to have been launched with Bitcoin support, but maybe this has expanded (as it should) towards other currencies.

Can someone share their experience with Brave Payments, or with similar systems?

This seems like the only logical way to go, from a technology standpoint, and we're not that far off from reaching it.

Creators have their digital wallets, payments are made in the background (with very limited user interaction, or none whatsoever) after a certain smart contract is fulfilled between creator and consumer, and the funds are transferred with very little latency.

The content creation service that launches with this will be huge in the near future. Bonus points for open sourcing it and making an open system that all content creation sites can reuse.

[0]: [https://www.brave.com/introducing-brave- payments/](https://www.brave.com/introducing-brave-payments/)

<comment><USER6> I really liked the idea of websites mining some cpu-mineable cryptocurrency in place of having ads there. I suspect that might be a more widespread solution in the future. Maybe even in the long term, the mining will be done through webGL or some other API so that the browser can take advantage of the host's GPU/GPU equivalent.

<comment><USER26> It seems you haven't thought about the consequences for such an approach.

<comment><USER6> If you see major issues then you should say what they are. I think trading some battery/mains power and a bit of wear on the device for using an otherwise ad-based service sounds fine.

<comment><USER26> First consider how much is "some battery." E.g. do you really want that more computing work allows higher payments? Bad luck paying anything not cents when you don't have your computer or a mobile plugged in the wall. Who's "richer"? Who has a bigger computer. Etc. Also see my other comment here.

<comment><USER6> What's the expected return per pageview for the average ad? Not more than a few cents either, is it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The cynical view:

"We took a calculated risk, announcing the set of changes, and seeing what the fallout would be. The fallout exceeded the threshold we set, so we're now going to issue the apology we had prepared in case that situation was reached."

<comment><USER28> I'm not sure why that requires cynacism. It _is_ a business, after all. I would rather them do this than blunder along blindly with policies that might cause them to fail entirely, and adversely affect all those that rely on they far more than this did.

<comment><USER29> It IS cynicism, by definition. If we have come to expect cynicism from business as something usual, that's sad, but it is cynic nonetheless.

If they had been upfront about it from the beginning, it would still be a business decision, only less cynic.

<comment><USER30> FWIW, cynic is a noun.

<comment><USER29> Thanks. Cynical would be the right word, I see. English is not my primary language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm scratching my head wondering why they didn't just take the obvious route of offering an optional 'also pay the processing fees' option like paypal does. Phrased in a way that lets the patron know that their supported creators are getting a larger cut as a result. They might have been pleasantly surprised by how many people will go for that as long as it's voluntary and the fees are reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER32> At least Liberapay had a good week: [https://liberapay.com/about/stats](https://liberapay.com/about/stats) \- 50% increase in active users, 8x increase in money deposited.

It's still a rounding error compared to Patreon's size, but I'm happy to see open-source non-profit grow.

<comment><USER33> And I really like their model. You sent a fixed amount of money to your account once and then distribute it over time as you like. For a 100€ load this is 60¢ in fees. _Withdrawing euros to a SEPA bank account is free._ Totally awesome!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I don't understand why they had to make the change global. Why didn't they just do this for e.g. patrons paying more than $10 (or whichever amount makes sense)? I support a lot of projects but only the minimum of $1-2 per month/project and suddenly they were all $2-3 (multiplied by 10 projects is a huge tax).

</comment><comment><USER35> I like the model of having the patron pay the (variable) cc fee, and having either the patron or creator pay the patreon fee.

$patron_charge = $pledges_to_creators + $cc_fee + ($patreon_fee?)

$creator_payout = $pledges_from_patrons - ($patreon_fee?)

My beef is with aboloshing payment batching, which is the only wholesome value proposition of patreon (i.e. strictly creates or spreads wealth). Without that it's just another locked-down social graph.

The goal for this change seemed to be at-cost fee payments with no loss or profit, and to prevent chargebacks from customers who didn't remember/expect a payment total or payment date.

The first goal is acomplished with the patron-pays-cc-fee model, and the second one might be solveable enough with UX tweaks.

Showing how the total is calculated in a big, ledgible table, perhaps after every new pledge, seems like a useful start. Maybe even showing a calendar, granting the ablility to change the monthly charge date, and sending/offering reminders or adding an export-to-calendar button.

Of course those may be overwhelming to users, so maybe KISS and find out what can be improved later.

</comment><comment><USER36> I mean, how many ways can you say "To make this viable, we need more money. That can come from you, or it can come indirectly via fees to your patrons. Which would you prefer?"

<comment><USER37> I don't think any of the blog posts Patreon made said that?

What they said was: "We're changing our business model to make every subscription a separate credit card charge, instead of bundling all subscriptions into one monthly charge. The credit card processing fees will be radically higher, so we're passing them on to you, but we won't make any extra money from this ourselves"

Personally I found their decision pretty baffling, as in my book the monthly aggregation was the main thing differentiating their product from Paypal, Stripe and suchlike.

<comment><USER38> Does anyone have any idea what advantage charging each subscription separately was supposed to have?

<comment><USER39> There is a subset of creators who are trying to use Patreon as a paywall for their content. This change was entirely about trying to make sure that nobody could ever sign up to support a creator, get access, scrape all their paid content, then stop supporting that person without ever being charged.

Unfortunately changing the payment model for EVERY creator site-wide completely breaks aggregating multiple payments into one charge. Which, as a creator, is the entire reason I'm on Patreon in the first place - I could just set up a Paypal widget and try to get my fans to subscribe to that for about the same fees, minus the 5% to Patreon.

Or at least that was the argument they gave, there are multiple theories about why they were doing this (those new VC loans they were crowing about last month wanna see some profit, maybe aggregating micropayments is brushing perilously close to laws designed to fight money laundering, they're trying to look more profitable before selling themselves, they just want more money baths) that are rather less charitable than "they got obsessed with solving this one problem caused by people trying to use Patreon in ways it was never designed for and threw the baby out with the bathwater".

<comment><USER40> The subset of creators who DO use Patreon as a paywall service seems to be the _majority_! Patreon _pushes_ perks as a key part of their model, and it's always easier (thought not as ethical arguably) to restrict otherwise shareable content than to offer something naturally scarce (dedicated time, physical goods) to patrons.

But even though most creators do this artificial-scarcity paywall thing, only a small _minority_ of them probably have even the slightest worry about freeriders. Most focus on continuing to be productive and don't stress out about the horror of some freerider "stealing" by getting around the paywall and then not paying. It's a pathological worry to freak out about that. It's healthy to just focus on all those who are happy supporters and want to donate.

Patreon screwed up by focusing their attention on the noisy minority who were not only using paywalls but demanding that Patreon make the paywalls stronger.

And while they come up with a non-stupid way to deal with charges around stronger paywalls, they show no indication of stepping back from prioritizing strong paywalls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm glad they're reversing these changes. But these developments scream loud and clear that no creator should ever rely too heavily on any single platform. If I was a creator I would certainly still be on the lookout for alternatives.

<comment><USER42> Patreon took off because it _was_ the alternative, as traditional YouTube/website ad revenue has high variance and has been decreasing over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This is probably too late for a lot of creators, so hopefully Patreon feels the pain of this boneheaded decision for a long time to come.

Several of the people and projects I sponsor have moved to alternative services, and I followed them. In the future, if a competing service is offered I will favor it over Patreon.

<comment><USER44> What alternatives are there?

<comment><USER43> One went to LiberaPay, another set up something called SendOwl, and a third just put their product on itch.io.

There are actually a lot of different ways to setup this kind of funding stream, depending on what you're looking for. If you're looking for "Patreon, but not Patreon" then it gets a little more complicated.

<comment><USER17> It's LiberaPay not LibrePay

<comment><USER43> Corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> You mean they didn't look at the stats and see how low the average pledge is, and the many, many users who pledge $1-2?

Whilst it's a nicely worded apology, they F'd up being greedy, and are now trying to recover by maintaining that closeness with the users. I'm not buying it.

</comment><comment><USER46> I understand why they need to do something different. It's no mistake that the rule was $0.35 plus a percentage. All the credit card companies that people use to pay with Patreon charge the retailer per transaction regardless of the size, and it's usually $0.20 to $0.35 plus a percentage; debit cards can be as high as $0.50 plus a percentage. _That_ has to be the motivation for this. So the first $1 you give is only like $0.65, and that's just the payment processing fee. It also costs money to transfer the funds to the creator's account , and then Patreon gets 5% of what's left ([https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/204606125-How-...](https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/204606125-How-do-you-calculate-fees-)). Almost all the money has gone to fees.

Even if you run the charges once a month, this is a fee for each Patron and another fee for each creator. If you're a patron and you're giving just $1 to just one creator, you're probably giving them like $0.10 and Patreon a big fat penny.

This is why so many stores have a minimum transaction amount for credit cards. If they don't do that, they can lose money on fees because the profit margin on what they're selling doesn't even cover the service charge.

<comment><USER47> Patreon originally aggregated all payments into a monthly lump transaction to Patreon. The new fee structure is consistent with them desegregating the payments but it is not clear why they would do that.

One theory going around is that having individual payments reduces their chargeback rate because the number in the credit card bill matches the individual contributions instead of the lump sum. Another theory going around is that separate payments would allow payments to be immediately sent to the creator instead of waiting until the end of the month. But Patreon hasn't been clear if one of these is the reason or if it was something else.

<comment><USER46> > The new fee structure is consistent with them desegregating the payments but > it is not clear why they would do that.

From what I've read, the credit card companies are complaining about partial refunds, which apparently occur much more often with Patreon. If I've got 10 creators I'm supporting for $1 each, and I decide I need a refund for one of them, well, Patreon only ran one $10 transaction. Now it's kind of a pain in the ass for the credit card company because I'm telling my credit card company it should be 10 transactions @ $1 and I want to refund $1, but what they see is one $10 transaction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> What is missing from the blog post and from comments here as well is something I saw on Twitter: if they unbundle and charge on the "anniversary" of the join date of everyone then anyone shipping physical is utter screwed. They used to have a single day (say, the 6th) when they shipped out to everyone who paid and that was it. Shipping every day for small creators doesn't work -- they need time to create :)

</comment><comment><USER49> They should put the executive payroll on patreon. That would prevent any future mishaps. :)

</comment><comment><USER50> I wonder how long companies will be able to do stuff like this.

I know Hanlon's razor but lately I get the feeling that most of the companies try to push shitty stuff on their customers and in case of getting caught with the hand still in the cookie jar they apologize profusely and move on to another one.

I refuse to believe that it was innocent accident. As other commenter pointed out this was discussed for a long time and most likely WAS an educated decision. The only thing that was underestimated here is amount of outrage that followed.

</comment><comment><USER51> You had _one job_ , Patreon: aggregate payments to eliminate fixed transaction fees for the people exchanging money through your platform, replacing them with a percentage fee. You set the percentage too low and then, instead of simply raising it, you tried to stop doing the _one thing_ that made you useful: eliminating fixed transaction fees. It's a pretty good corporate apology, but it demonstrates a surprising lack of understanding of their business.

</comment><comment><USER52> One thing that bugs me about these types of 'we hear you loud and clear' statements is the stylistic use of the 'corporate first person plural'. I feel the "we" in this contexts sounds a lot less authentic than a first person singular statement from the founder / CEO.

While companies certainly do have a specific and sometimes even unique culture, do we really think that _they_ have "core beliefs"?

</comment><comment><USER53> A patronage/donation model has no reason to worry about pledges being cancelled early since there no purchase or expectation of goods. Sure some people might have done that but it's already a community willing paying money to support people they liked so it seems that behavior filters itself.

Unless they were trying to become a real commerce and subscription business, it seems rather disingenuous to claim that as a reason, and it looks like that was the core foundation because taking that away leaves little more than saying that the existing system was "confusing", which could've be solved differently. Also I'm not sure how individual payments with even more fees could be less confusing than a single payment and fee per month but this is a rather unfortunate incident for all the patrons who have to suffer from the loss.

</comment><comment><USER54> I wonder whether this rollback was caused by them actually listening to their users or the huge dip in revenue as people stopped donating.

Well. Either way. This looks like a good thing. Until the VCs start again to pressure for more revenue. Let's see what happens then. Probably higher fees for the creators.

</comment><comment><USER55> Is Patreon making a profit right now?

<comment><USER56> No, they're making significant losses, and according to rumors, credit card companies are seeing too high refund rates with Patreon, and are asking them to either fund that, or unbundle the payments.

<comment><USER57> Do you have a source for these rumors. This is the second comment I've seen on this post suggesting this but I can't find any supporting evidence.

According to Patreon's blog posts the unbundling was entirely related to the "date of first subscription" problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Look how good it is to be customers and not the product? You get to have apologies.

</comment><comment><USER59> I wonder if this came out of the SF/Bay Area style growth after taking on investment? I haven't heard if they've been hiring a ton lately but I saw this happen with SurveyMonkey when we went from 100 employees to 1500.

The first 100 understood EVERYTHING about our customers and the product. Something got lost in translation when we grew to 1500 in a few years.

I wonder if they have scaled out to the point where they are hiring people who don't quite understand the product but are just a butt in a seat?

</comment><comment><USER60> I think a major issue that many commentators here don't touch is the idea that Patreon plainly lied to its users. They said "more money will go to creators" when the real action was "we're charging more money to users with barely any more benefit to creators". Everyone understands that $1 going to $1.37 is "more money going to Patreon" and the stated benefit was spin. It didn't make me change my pledges but I was shocked by the dishonesty.

</comment><comment><USER61> Good sports. I have about $50/mo going to creators on the site. I would follow wherever they went. Hopefully they managed to keep this stuff from disrupting too many people.

</comment><comment><USER62> A blog post as an apology? I can picture the CEO in a meeting, "Hey if this doesn't work out, we can just draft a really sincere sounding letter to our creators."

<comment><USER63> You should suggest the alternative response for the less imaginative of us, because what else could they do in response? It just comes across as snarky for people to hate the changes and dismiss them again when they rollback the policy everyone hated.

This is an unprofitable startup here, so I don't think they can start giving out money to everyone who lost support.

Businesses make mistakes, and I'd think it would be a positive when they listen to their users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Not surprised. There's no way this made sense, and they already freaked out tons of people who cared only partly about the fee and partly about the feeling of helplessness when you rely on a for-profit platform that can change at a seeming whim and pull the rug out from under you.

Pulling back addresses the fee concerns directly and gives _some_ feeling that the users can have _some_ influence, although they'll stay wary.

None of this changes what drove the fee issue in the first place: Patreon _tries_ to present itself as a donation platform but is _primarily_ a _paywall service_. Since _most_ "creators" use it to easily manage _restricted_ access to shareable perks (i.e. perks that are non-rivalrous in nature and _could_ be shared with the world), they will continue to have to serve that freemium business model.

<comment><USER64> As everyone on the internet eagerly pointed out the moment this was announced, you can get a best-of-both-worlds solution by simply prorating the second month.

Nothing actually eliminates piracy issues; it's easy to discreetly mirror an RSS feed, for example. You're ultimately relying on the honesty of the vast majority of your patrons, a strategy which has worked out for Patreon creators very well thus far.

<comment><USER40> Totally. The point is that the Patreon folks made the stupid decisions about the new fee because they were blindly thinking about effective paywalls. If they had been thinking holistically about things, they wouldn't have been so dumb. Of course, there are better ways to handle even the paywall issue.

The stupidity was clear when they wrote "if you're a creator on the monthly plan without the benefit of charge up front, you are constantly worried that your patrons are going to delete their pledges before they've paid". From that, we can see how they were just hearing irrational paywall worries from people and responding irrationally around just trying to please those requests / address those worries.

Those worries _should_ have been recognized as irrational. Patreon _ought_ to be saying that this is about honesty and people who _want_ to support you and that they aren't in the business to try to stop all possible freeriding, they are working to help everyone who actually wants to support the creators etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> The thing everyone is missing is that you CANNOT do $1 credit card payment at scale. Patreon has been taking a hit for every single dollar pledge made. They dont want your $1, it costs them too much!

Patreon decided that they were SICK of supplementing all the $1 pledges, and added a new fee schedule. The internet, was too short sighted to care about this economic reality, and so they were forced to burn with fees once more.

<comment><USER66> And that's why the older model worked better: a donor would pledge $1 to twenty creators, and would get charged one $20 transaction fee at the beginning of each month.

The creators ate the Paypal fee (usually 4-5%), and then Patreon collected an additional 5% for simply coordinating these exchanges with their service.

I doubt there were many people who only pledged $1 to one creator and that was it. But if that was truly a problem, then sure, _one_ 35-cent charge per month would be reasonable.

<comment><USER67> Thank you for explaining. I never understood the aggregation of donations process. Maybe a majority of their customers are paying $1 to 1 person? Are there really people that give away x $1/month to multiple random internet folks? I don't get it.

<comment><USER68> Hi, I pay $1-$3 to about 10 creators, plus some higher pledges.

A $1 pledge, to me, is a way to say "I enjoy your content. I want you to keep doing it, instead of needing to quit and get a 'real job'. And I use adblock so you aren't otherwise getting any benefit from my enjoyment.". When 1000s of other people make the same $1/mo decision as me, the creator has a stable income, and they create more and better content, which is good for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Patreon have built a kind micropayments platform, but suddenly they decided they weren't happy with being a micropayments platform anymore, charging PayPal-level fees on transactions, and many more artifically inflated transactions at that. We already have PayPal, we don't need Patreon as a second one which isn't competitive.

</comment><comment><USER69> Server being internet-hugged. Cache: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IFhxAy...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:IFhxAyCJ1fMJ:https://blog.patreon.com/not- rolling-out-fees-change/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER70> In 2017 it ought to be basically impossible to flatten a typical server dishing up static content. I suspect all that is getting hugged is the ads and tracking...

<comment><USER71> Quickly browsing the meta tags, it's a Wordpress site, likely running on a tiny bit of hardware (possibly not even multiple servers). Those are easy to flatten.

<comment><USER72> Maybe not even one whole server. Could just be one virtual machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Users who were upset with the change need to reckon with the fact that Patreon isn't profitable and that it's likely that it's _impossible_ for them to ever become profitable with their 5% business model (Patreon is based in San Francisco and has over 100 employees, do the math).

<comment><USER74> They can just take a larger share of creators' aggregate earnings if they need more money. Obviously the creators won't be happy, but it wouldn't destroy the "many individual $1-2 donations" segment, as this change would've done.

<comment><USER75> This is what Upwork did. Freelancers weren't happy, but the anger died down and the company is still in business.

Background: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11626864](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11626864)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> As usual. If you want a company to change, you have to affect their bottom dollar. Otherwise, you'll only get a "we have learned through this experience and will take it forward with us to prevent [our messed up thing we did] from [ever being noticed by you again]."

</comment><comment><USER77> I waited a few days before canceling my $1-2 pledges, and completed my cancellations yesterday. So now today I had to spend some time going back through and _re-pledging_ the stupid $1-2 pledges to lessen the screw to my beloved creators. What a clusterfuck!

</comment><comment><USER78> It was my impression that patreon needs to find a profitable footing to continue existing. Generally I would see increased revenues as a good thing (it helps to ensure that a service people appreciate continues to exist).

Given that - why has there been such a push back against this?

<comment><USER79> A lot of people viewed Patreon as a microtransaction service. They give $1 to a bunch of creators. Creators liked this because it meant they could get a bunch of low value supportors instead of a relatively few high value ones.

Previously, Patreaon worked fine for this use-case. You support 10 creators at $1 each. Patreon charges you $10 each month, and credits $1 to each of your pledgies accounts. Patreon then eats $FEES from the pledgie's account and gives them the remaining money. Patreon would aggragate transfers so they only pay transaction fees on the single $10 charge to me, and on the final payment to the creator. As a result of this (and maybe other things), the fees were unpredictable to the creators, because they did not know how many other creators were splitting the transaction fees. In this example, a single creator would only see a ~$0.03 fee on my $1 donation; however, if I only had a single creator, he would see the full $0.30 on my dontation. (There are other fees at play, but this is the important one).

Under the new system, every donation pays the $0.35 transaction fee. This means that even if I support 10 creators, they all pay the full $0.35 on my $1 donation.

In contrast, if I instead had a single creator at $10, he would only see $0.38 in fees, or about $0.04 per dollar.

This means that the new system disproportional effects people making small donations.

It is also not clear that this was a pure money grab. This change coincided with a change to their payment system where they would stop aggregating charges. If they do not aggragate charges, it makes sense that they would charge smaller donations more, because those now have more overhead. The problem is that this breaks the service for small donation use cases.

<comment><USER80> You missed that the fee was going to be paid by the patrons, not the creators. Instead of being charged 1$, you would be charged $1.37ish for EACH pledge, meaning distributing your (for example) 35$ budget out to a bunch of different creators would screw you over.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> It seems to me that patreon thinks that its customers are the creators, and so it has been focusing its effort on pleasing them. In fact it is quite clear by asking "who pays the money" that their customers are in fact the patrons.

<comment><USER82> This seems straightforward, if only from a cash flow perspective-- customers are the people who give you money; vendors are the people you give money to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Are there really that many patrons who feel the value they get from whatever they are supporting is a single dollar? Leave the transaction fees as they were going to be, and make the minimum amount of patronage $5 or $10.

<comment><USER39> 50% of my Patreon money comes from $1 pledges. Many (if not all) of those pledges are from people who are giving $1 to multiple creators.

I post most of the stuff I make online for free, with no ads. All those $1s add together to make a sustainable wage for me.

It's the Long Tail in action. It's pretty nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Patreon lost my support when they banned Lauren Southern. They have every right to do so but I don't want to support a company that refuses to work with people based on their political leanings.

<comment><USER63> Platforms aren't neutral parties and have to make calls like this. "Political leanings" is misdirection.

Participating in attempts to block NGO (affiliated with Doctors without Borders) ships performing maritime search and rescue missions for migrants is particularly heinous. If it must be spelled out, this is acting to prevent the rescue of drowning refugees.

Are you really supporting freedom of expression by allowing your platform to support people who don't support others right to exist?

<comment><USER84> I think the argument is to do with political leanings. Some believe that NGO boats incentivize human trafficking. If this is true more people will die via human trafficking than would if these NGO were interrupted.

While that argument is not super solid it is a political one and to Ban her based on her intention to report on this seems political to me.

<comment><USER63> You can rephrase this as much as you want, but this is not just "her intention to report on this". This is obstructing humanitarian efforts in a way that leads to loss of life.

You're claiming the motivations here are to protect the lives of migrants by limiting "incentived human trafficking", but the motive is white nationalism.

[http://www.dw.com/en/defend-europe-identitarians-charter- a-s...](http://www.dw.com/en/defend-europe-identitarians-charter-a-ship-to- return-migrants-to-africa/a-39702947)

<comment><USER84> Most of those quotes are from the activist group Hope not Hate. They are a group on the left saying a group on the right is bad. Can you see how this is a deeply political issue?

I hear far too often that people on the right are white nationalist, yet I see no one presenting evidence they are. There are some white nationalist on the right but I don't think it's fair to tar everyone on the right with the same brush.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> Saying you're sorry and not doing it is good enough for me.

<comment><USER21> They said they're sorry and they're going to do _something_ toward whatever the hell it was they thought they were doing in the coming year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> What's odd to me is that they don't seem to have understood that spreading this charge (basically the credit card fee) across several people the patron is sponsoring, is more or less their purpose. If a given patron is not (typically) sponsoring more than one artist (or whatever), then yes they would/will have a problem, but they also wouldn't have a reason to exist. It's not like there aren't other ways to accept a credit card online, on a repeating basis even. Enabling a "tip jar on a monthly basis" was their whole reason for existence. They may not have known this.

</comment><comment><USER87> I cancelled my account, glad to see they got the message. It will take a while until I rejoin, if I do ever join. I might donate directly now.

</comment><comment><USER49> I think I read it somewhere else too, but why does a company setup for community contributions need to raise money through venture capital?

</comment><comment><USER88> It creeps me out to no end when corporations mimic human social behavior using community relations teams. It's made worse by people thinking that anything about the content of the apology matters. It was literally crafted by an expert actor. The only thing we should care about is the reversal and whatever concrete action Patreon takes to prevent a new fiasco (which I see no mention of). The company executed a business decision with bumbling incompetence, then was forced to back it out because of their customers. That later bit _is_ interesting, the fact that it was accompanied by something written by a trained parrot is not.

I'd still be looking for alternatives, the original decision was a gross breach of trust and revealed that Patreon's business 1decisions are not coming from the authentic place we may once have hoped for.

edit: to clarify, the content I'm looking for in a real apology is a plan of action so that this isn't repeated. Patreon needs to restore trust. Apology language doesn't do that. Rolling back the act of searing incompetence was step one. Making sure it doesn't happen again is the real apology.

<comment><USER89> People complain when you're a robot, people complain when you're a human.

> It's made worse by people thinking that anything about the content of the > apology matters. It was literally crafted by an expert actor.

Yes they are a money making organization...that's why they were able to build such a useful service in the first place and yes they paid people to write this letter... who happen to be people that are good at communicating. Does that mean we should question every action they make as insincere because they are self-interested?

Most free/open-source projects are so over-burdened with work/bug reports that they neglect PR pieces like this as they simply don't have the time. It's a good thing it was written by an expert writer IMO, even if it does contain a bit of spin people typically have enough common-sense to know the difference where it matters.

The whole reason they rolled back this change is because they were ultimately self-interested... the customers were very unhappy about it and protested, which may hurt their business, so they rolled it back. It's win-win for everyone. They aren't forcing anyone to use the service, people use it because it's useful and the company gets rewarded for not pissing them off.

Not to mention there is a real action/behaviour behind this letter... it's not just PR-speak sidestepping an issue, as we've seen in the past. It's an announcement that they made a mistake and listened to consumer feedback and are reversing a bad decision.

I find many of these types of complaints (see: every FB group made after changes made to FB) are just people looking for something to whine about, or to feel superior to a company, and they typically aren't representing the average consumer. Most messaging like this is considering the interests of the average/majority customer. Not the cynical/high iq minority who is touchy about copywriting in press releases.

<comment><USER90> >Yes they are a money making organization...that's why they were able to build such a useful service in the first place and yes they paid people to write this letter... who happen to be people that are good at communicating. Does that mean we should question every action they make as insincere because they are self-interested?

Yes! As customers in a cold, realist world, we're doomed to have an adversarial relationship with the organizations trying to profit from us. The question is who wins: Joe Six-pack like you and me, or the suits with the lawyers and PR teams?

<comment><USER89> > The question is who wins: Joe Six-pack like you and me, or the suits with > the lawyers and PR teams?

... who wins what? The most value which the company provides?

Apologies if I missed some sarcasm here, it's hard to tell these days.

I'm curious what customers are potentially losing or being 'manipulated' here ... because a company wrote a human personal-style press release.

We're not talking about the special advantages large companies or wealthy individuals get as a result of government policy or in the court room... where politicians and law makers can be bought off or influenced in in their favour, over competitors or consumer interests.

And if customers occasionally reacting negatively, in regards to a service they clearly care about enough to protect and protest to making a change, is 'adversarial' then you're engaging in your own spin. This seems like a healthy give and take. The fundamental basis on which our society is built.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> The way to prevent such future issues is to move to a decentralized platform, perhaps using a blockchain.

</comment><comment><USER92> Too late, the damage is done.

</comment><comment><USER93> I already deleted all my subscriptions. I'm too lazy to put it back.

</comment><comment><USER94> Cancelled a subscription that I had also, will have to return now. yipes

</comment><comment><USER95> Excellent apology. They are in a tough position.

</comment><comment><USER96> I am in the States and I am charged VAT. I emailed them, tweeted to them - <USER2> response! I can't believe this company is run so poorly!

</comment><comment><USER97> I don't understand why that would have impacted more $1 donors than others. Someone please explain!

<comment><USER98> Because there is a 0.35c flat fee per donation along with the 2.9% (ignored in the sample).

So giving ten euros to 1 creator actually costs 10.35 to the patron. Giving 1 euros to 10 creators costs 13.50

<comment><USER97> Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER99> No apology is enough to atone for Pomplamoose.

</comment><comment><USER100> Hah.

Wait, what happened?

</comment><comment><USER101> They are a young company dealing with money and playing in a very controversial space (they will be attacked and targeted for providing a service to people like Sam Harris - who is seen as a bigot by large swaths of the left). They are going to get things wrong as they mature. It will take time.

</comment><comment><USER102> I really liked that people voted with their wallets. I funded $10/month to a couple of people and pulled everything out. I'm glad they reversed the fee. Will start funding again.

I wish we could all do the same with our taxes to make a point to GOP.

<comment><USER103> You mean the party pushing for tax cuts?

<comment><USER104> They're raising them for Californians

<comment><USER105> why should the Federal government finance the tax methods the states impose on their citizens. this change is good because it will bring the methods of taxation, the value of taxes taken in, and their usage, to light.

far too often high taxation states have lived with the idea that the rich won't complaint too much since they can deduct a large portion from their federal taxes. yet all those not rich enough to itemize got stuffed.

people need to understand that deductions of state, real estate, and similar taxes, only serves the wealthy. Yet oddly the very same people who complain about the wealthy and taxes instantly pivot when they learn how its all done and that they will be affected.

We are the rich, the vast majority posting here make far more than the average if not in multiples. people think it takes millions to be rich, but its not true when you look at the numbers.

<comment><USER106> Why should states like California finance the federal government's handouts to other states that refuse to actually tax their own population, do you mean? And why are you ok with the federal government financing states that use property taxes, but not other types?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> The fact you didn't engage with the community initially or ask for feedback speaks far more about your arrogance, incompetence and mendacity that the nature of the change itself. If I was using Patreon I would be looking for alternatives anyway...how long until the next "surprise"?

<comment><USER108> That's pretty harsh. They made a mistake and then apologize. While they didn't "initially" they did "eventually" \- don't they deserve some credit for that?

<comment><USER109> No. Allowing companies to continuously treat its customers poorly as they test out pricing structures to maximise profits is how gambling become common in computer games and makes up 50% of EAs profits. It shows their intent, to work out how to maximise their earnings and keep everyone grumbling but still using their service. Look for an exit if you are funded this way, this company is going to keep trying until it sticks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> Most things, if not everything, comes down to economics and not goodwill.

<comment><USER111> One of the greatest victories of Human Rights in the past few hundred years came down to philosophy and goodwill, not economics. The abolition of slavery cost the British government and Navy a considerable amount in their enforcement effort. The US paid a terrible price for it.

[http://imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2016/06/thomas-sowell- br...](http://imperium-europa.blogspot.com/2016/06/thomas-sowell-british-war- against.html)

Economics is one of the biggest factors deciding what people do. (I'd put it at #2 or #3) However, there are even mightier factors than money and livelihood. Otherwise, we'd be Ferengi, not humans, and the Ferengi characters in Star Trek which are written to be different would be the main characters. That economics reigns supreme is one of the false cornerstones of the original Marxian economics which experts in the field now know to be false, but which persists in zombie form in the popular consciousness.

<comment><USER112> That's a comforting fiction, however the truth has more to do with the industrial revolution, and the fact that a joule from coal is significantly cheaper than a joule from a slave.

Future high primary energy cost economies will almost certainly be based on slave labour, like they have in the past.

<comment><USER111> _That 's a comforting fiction, however the truth has more to do with the industrial revolution, and the fact that a joule from coal is significantly cheaper than a joule from a slave._

Then why not have slaves running your coal powered machinery? The truth is that the free labor of slaves was just a particular (and ultimately inefficient) pattern of organizing society, and the human capital of knowledge is the real driving force. If energy was the ruling force, then West Virginia wouldn't be so poor and rural, and Japan wouldn't be a world economic powerhouse.

 _Future high primary energy cost economies will almost certainly be based on slave labour, like they have in the past._

Even in the historical US, slaves that worked in agriculture and industries that required knowledge and attention to detail were _paid_. Otherwise, there is no motivation for energizing the human capital of skill and knowledge.

If the way you see the world were accurate, then totalitarian societies would be the wealthy ones. Instead, those with some degree of free trade and individual freedom are the wealthy ones.

<comment><USER112> This is what I wrote: "a joule from coal is significantly cheaper than a joule from a slave", read my comment again. In your reply you stated the same.

My point is that it was cheap coal energy that freed slaves, the economic realities of coal joules vs human joules, not high justice, economics.

<comment><USER111> _My point is that it was cheap coal energy that freed slaves, the economic realities of coal joules vs human joules, not high justice, economics._

Then you are clearly demonstrating that you didn't carefully read the entirely what I wrote. The "free" labor of slavery was of little relative utility over other forms of social organization. In effect, it was just another (particularly egregious) form of social organization. All forms of human organization back then had _about the same_ access to human joules. In all cases, the value of the human joules and coal joules was greatly increased through the addition of human capital in the form of skill and knowledge. Having the power of life and death obedience over people only goes so far. It gets you only a very crude application of those human joules. In order to get the maximum value out of your working population, you need forms of motivation beyond life and death obedience.

The key fact is that the productive capacity of _human capital intelligently combined_ with energy far outstrips the output of poorly applied energy. _The key is the human capital, not the energy._ If it was just the energy, then you'd just have slaves running coal powered plants. You would not have had slaves running business as in the Roman Empire, or artisan slaves and paid specialist agricultural in the US.

High justice, as a form of human capital, enables economics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER113> Great move by YouTube!

Edit: oops, sorry, it's Patreon. That damn dog whistle again...

</comment><comment><USER114> The sad part is that Patreon has to backtrack and apologize so aggressively. I read the email the other day while sitting on the toilet and thought nothing of it. Was there any actual blowback or just a couple of loud mouths on Twitter that can't afford to rub a few pennies together? You can't make everyone happy, especially in the quest to make money.

<comment><USER43> There was a substantial blowback from both creators and patrons. The problem wasn't really the switch to having patrons cover overhead, it was that no attempt was made at all to aggregate pledges in order to reduce that overhead. This disproportionately affected patrons who pledge small amounts to a lot of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER115> I'm not sure how patreon is supposed to work; i signed up a long time ago, and I haven't seen a red cent from them. In the meantime I've gotten hundreds of dollars from Amazon and add AdWords.

<comment><USER116> You are not being sarcastic right? I am finding it hard to be charitable here.

Patreon is just a place for your fans to support your work in a structured manner (rather than a free-form donate button).

If you are a content creator, it is up to you to market your patreon account and request your fans to support you there. Did you do that?

<comment><USER115> Literally have not seen a dollar from them. I get a few dollars every month passively from amazon affiliate links</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Looking for feedback on my side project - <AUTHOR> I am looking for any kind of feedback on my side project template2pdf[1]. My main problem is to spread the word about the service without behaving or feeling like a spammer. I get a sign up now an then, some people are using the service on a regular base, so I guess I am not totally off with the product itself.
If you have the time and energy, please provide feedback on the following questions:
Do you understand the problem I'm solving? English is not my first language, if you have an idea on how to communicate better, please let me know.
Do you like the website itself?
Any idea on how to improve the sign up form? Should it be on the start page?
Sadly, I have not nearly enough visitors to do A/B testing, so I need people to actually tell me their opinion.
At the moment, you could actually enter a wrong email address and just start testing. Should I advertise that?
About getting people to know the service:
I'm not active on facebook, twitter or any kind of social media service that could help me to spread the word. Does anybody have experience in paying somebody to market to a target group there? Without feeling that this is somehow shady?
As a general question: How do you promote stuff without already established social media status while not behaving or feeling like a spammer?
Thanks for your time.
[1] http://template2pdf.com/ <comment><USER3> The website is nice and clean, well done! The idea is clear for a developer- type of mind.

Just a few specific remarks:

* smallest billing period is 1 month so I'd change jobs/day quota to jobs/month. Daily quota for a monthly plan is somewhat confusing and looks rather restrictive if it doesn't roll over to the next day.

* I'd drop yearly plan and "Servers" limit to keep things clear and simple. If needed, would add "contact if you need special arrangements (self-hosted, yearly plan etc)".

* To become easier to find by search, I'd find main use-cases why someone would use this template API for bulk-pdf conversion in the first place and use these use-cases for the selling, not focusing on the "template" and "API".

If it turns out that most of the users are using it for just one specific use- case then I'd focus on these and go extra mile to make it even more useful for that specific user-group.

The risk of focusing on actual use-case is that right now the site is very easy to understand, if rewriting it to tailor for use-cases then dev-minded surfer doesn't grasp what goes on.

I'd see companies use this service to generate invoices for small businesses or SaaS providers (running monthly the database query and feeding it to your API and storing the invoice in S3); tickets; vouchers; event nametags; customizing a presentation and document that is sent to the customers' user; where else?

EDIT: Ahh yes, and when logged in, please provide a way to see pricing and a way to convert to a paid account! :)

<comment><AUTHOR> The advice about writing down specific use cases to come up more often during search is brilliant. I have no idea why I did not think of this myself.

This will be among the first things I am going to implement.

<comment><USER4> Let me just add a vote for creating a set of use cases to demonstrate the potential use of the service. I think it would go a long way to helping non- technical users understand the value. It could just be me but if a developer has to get involved then the value proposition to me is much smaller as I'd just use dompdf, fpdf, or some similar library.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this is a great service! However the landing page is suffering from listing the features instead of the benefits.

Obviously you/developers care that it's a cool API that will replace the values. Will the mass market? Probably not. They want to know what they have to put in and what they will get out of it. Some visual reference to this would be good.

After all it's called template2pdf not template2API2pdf :)

I can see that currently you're thinking in the developer mindset but with some tweaks you could make it accessible for those that can't just send a hash. It could be awesome for LOTS of industries. Basically any industry that has sales reps & prepares quotes/invoices on the fly.

Maybe they just get a URL bookmark that displays an input form where they can enter their changing values & a PDF e-mailed to them. How great would that be to do mid-meeting on an iPad! A professional quote done before the end of the meeting. No going back to their office to prepare it! Sales reps would love that.

I almost missed that the words Template, API & PDF were links - I only found the output example by chance on second look! The output is super important, show it straight away!

Try to find a way of showing the template/input without it being a download.

Let people test it straight away - only ask for the e-mail/payment when they want to save their finished template.

As for not being a spammer, you can easily create content that isn't 100% sales pitch. So maybe you start a blog about automating & streamlining procedures, admin hacks etc - then at the end of each post you can refer back to how great template2pdf is.

Also, you could get a designer to create some pretty sweet template designs & make them part of the paid tiers.

<comment><AUTHOR> > A professional quote done before the end of the meeting.

I have actually some code ready that takes templates, generates forms out of them (even for offline mobile use) and uses template2pdf as backend. But explaining that in a short message is hard for me. So there is no website or good documentation on that yet. This will change very soon.

That is a fantastic use case that is easy to understand and explain.

> Try to find a way of showing the template/input without it being a download.

I've tried to gimp up a nice graphic several times. I will ask a friend to help me with that. This is actually something I wanted from the beginning but never had the time/energy to finish. It just never looked good and raised more questions than it tried to answer.

Having some more pre-designed templates is also a good idea. This might not attract the right audience via search engines, but could be of real value to potential customers. (And value for non potential customers.. which is also nice.)

<comment><USER5> That offline feature will be VERY important. I know a LOT of companies are looking for solutions to inputting data reliably on mobile devices when there is no connectivity. It's critical to maintaining a professional appearance, it's a very important feature!

I think showing some different invoice designs helps visitors get to the 'ohhh this is aimed at me' moment a lot sooner.

So if you have a mockup of a real estate invoice or a photographer's quote, perhaps a pharma rep pro forma, seeing industries listed are what helps people to identify themselves as a potential customer.

After all most visitors arrive at a site with the mindset of 'this might be something not applicable to me / my business' that's when they look for anchor points :- industry references, technical jargon, credibility from recognisable brands in their field. As soon as they see something familiar, they are like, 'ok, this is something I should pay attention to'

Do whatever you can to tell your target market 'you, yes YOU are my ideal customer'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lawyers and accountants, accounts payable, general ledger. Anyone who needs to have a .PDF, print it, sign it, scan it back. In large quantities.

I visited your site. It is simple and straightforward. But something surprised me: I was expecting the likes of Accenture, E&Y, Genpact, someone like that, as a target market (internal solutions may exist in these companies, but I have never encountered them, always a cropped screenshot then copy-pasted document, and this has been thousands of times).

Smaller clients does make sense: your target market as smaller clients could knock the pants off larger clients (in a small, accounts payable way) in terms of style an appearance. Can you get your clients to integrate to SAP or other accounting systems?

In direct answer to your questions (Firefox on Mint Ubuntu/Linux/GNU):

I am not a fan of the typography. For polish, add a bit of line-spacing, in the bullets in particular.

Perhaps separate each section (topic area) of the front page with a different background (I know this is terribly Bootstrap, but hey).

Registration: Do not advertise a lack of credibility / assuredness. But do not demand intrusive personal information (turns off both corporate types trying something out and technologists for a myriad of reasons).

I did not detect an option for HTTPS. This is a must for any site proposing dealing or storing financial or client information.

Try a start up form on the front page, or a direct shot of a demo. Include use cases and customer comments (do not fake these, make them checkable - <USER2> with your commenters this is OK beforehand).

Word of mouth counts for a lot, especially in professional circles that do not use social media (other than perhaps talk to one's family and old friends). Get a foothold with some oldskool businesses, then when you have a little coming in as revenue seek ways to pump it up (when you've shown it is a credible service this is orders of magnitude easier, in the most unexpected ways).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your input.

About https. I am ashamed that I've not yet purchased a recognized certificate. There should be a self signed certificate running, but since I did not set up my own CA, this is not really ready for production. The example code in the documentation does not verify the ssl endpoint. I need to fix that..

How do others handle this?

I wanted to buy a signature from a CA that is recognized by the majority of browsers and build my own CA for the API.

<comment><USER3> btw, StartSSL offers free SSL certs that work with most browsers.

If something goes wrong then StartSSL revocation is _not_ free but as the revocation system is pretty broken anyways u might not care, see [1] for details, if interested.

I'd use a recognized CA also for the API (smth recognized by all supported language SDKs). It can be a trouble to guide users through adding your CA as trusted CA for each case. Python, Java etc look up certs with a different strategy/have different CA truststores. For me namecheap has been one of the best offers for cheap SSL certs when StartSSL becomes too inflexible [2] or is not supported widely enough [3].

[1] [http://www.ahtik.com/blog/startssl-revocation-fees-will- not-...](http://www.ahtik.com/blog/startssl-revocation-fees-will-not-matter- and-ssl-certs-are-funky_u1g8E/)

[2] Each free StartSSL domain can have exactly one alternate domain name, so you can have one cert with both template2pdf.com and www.template2pdf.com OR template2pdf.com and api.template2pdf.com OR www.template2pdf.com and api.template2pdf.com.

[3] AFAIK at least java 6 & 7 does NOT ship with StartSSL CA included in truststore.

<comment><USER7> You can't use the free certificate for commercial sites.

<comment><USER3> You can. Please provide the source, I'm not aware of such constraint.

EDIT: The marketing speech that is often used to claim that more expensive certs are for more serious business is mostly baseless. Yes, you can pay to have your identity checked more carefully and pay even more to get the extended validation and a green bar, but this is "eye-candy" for most cases.

Nothing at [https://www.startssl.com/?app=1](https://www.startssl.com/?app=1) tells that free Class 1 cert is not allowed for commercial purposes.

<comment><USER8> [http://www.startssl.com/policy.pdf](http://www.startssl.com/policy.pdf) section 22.214.171.124 -- they sure don't mention that front-and-center, though.

quote: Class 1 certificates are limited to client and server certificates, whereas the later is restricted in its usage for non-commercial purpose only. Subscribers MUST upgrade to Class 2 or higher level for any domain and site of commercial nature, when using high-profile brands and names or if involved in obtaining or relaying sensitive information such as health records, financial details, personal information etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Clicketty-click: [http://template2pdf.com/](http://template2pdf.com/)

I visited your site expecting exactly the same kinds of problems I've given feedback about many times before[0][1].

I was pleasantly surprised. The landing page is clean, clear, and I immediately understood what you were doing. I don't have a need for your service, but I can see that it could easily fill a need.

I don't know how easy it is to use, but if the execution is good then I think you might have something. You have identified your problem, though. Exposure. You might want to change your landing site to increase the size of the problem being solved, and reduce the links to "Template," API," _etc._ The visitor needs to be reminded immediately of the pain, that way you catch their attention.

Others may have more to add about the marketing problem and your pricing choices. A few questions/comments:

* How is this better than just exporting a PDF from PowerPoint?

* Some of your copy seems to be targeted at sys-admin types - they aren't the ones with money.

* I suspect you need to start getting a network of interested people.

Good luck!

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7857964](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7857964)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7839799](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7839799)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow! Thanks for your nice comment.

About your PowerPoint question.. I don't know how to put this, but I think just the fact that you ask, means that my message did not come across clearly. Or do you know the answer and just want to say that I need to make this more obvious? :)

To answer the questions:

It is not better than a PowerPoint PDF export, but tries to solve the problem of doing many PowerPoint PDF exports while changing the content of the document on each export. This is doable by just sending a template document and some keys and values to be replaced.

The main pain it solved for me was that I don't need to do layout changes for my customers if they are using some of my software and want to change the layout of lets say a report or proforma.

Does this make sense?

About the targeting to sys-admin types. This is correct. Perhaps I should split the page into 'marketing' and 'read if you can code'. I will think about that.

Thanks!

<comment><USER9>
      > Wow! Thanks for your nice comment.

NP - happy to help.

      > About your PowerPoint question ... do you know the answer
      > and just want to say that I need to make this more obvious? :)

I know _an_ answer, but I think you could make your selling point clearer. Someone who doesn't read it as carefully as I might think this offers no real value over what they already do. To me, if someone creates lots of PDFs, broadly in bulk, broadly the same, this can offer huge advantages. That's implicit in your copy, but you need to make it more obvious to people.

      > ... many PowerPoint PDF exports while changing the content
      > of the document on each export ... just sending a template
      > document and some keys and values to be replaced.

Exactly - needs to be more obvious from the site.

      > The main pain it solved for me was that I don't need to do
      > layout changes for my customers if they are using some of
      > my software and want to change the layout ...

Again, write-up a more detailed specific use case and link to it somewhere.

      > About the targeting to sys-admin types. This is correct.

And difficult to solve. The people doing the work will know its value, the people with the money will need convincing. You need to hand the sys-admin types a convincing case to pass on to the people with the money.

Hope that helps. Be warned, anything I say could easily be wrong. You should test, test, test, test my assertions. Some things appear obvious, but are wrong. Take nothing for granted, and pursue it relentlessly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What a fantastic day!

A big thanks to all of you. I actually did not expect that much feedback. I just went to pick up some food. Now my access log is rotating, my apache needed a little tweaking and my pulse is high. :)

I appreciate every input and hope that I will be able to test out new ideas and work on the inspiration that I'm getting so far.

I am a bit overwhelmed and currently not able to say something smarter than 'thanks to all of you!'.

<comment><USER10> I don't think you have to say anything more elaborate, I think that most of the HN community more or less understands how much emotion is behind that simple "thanks to all of you".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't give feedback of this sort too often, so this might not necessarily be useful. Now, for the actual feedback.

This is a very useful product to have for the intended target audience.

From looking at the landing page, your target audience is developers who need to generate PDFs directly from a template.

This is only useful if they need PDFs in bulk, if not they can export to PDF.

While developers are a good target market, there is also the market of all people who need to generate PDF reports in bulk.

You could add a simple frontend allowing anyone to upload a template, with a spreadsheet containing the values to substitute. Think of the spreadsheet as the API parameters. Non-developers can easily use this interface and are very likely to find this service very useful. In addition, you can charge more since the interface will not require any dev skills to use.

The catch with this approach though, is that it might be harder to scale. When targeting enterprises a single sale gives you more revenue.

All the best!

</comment><comment><USER12> You have a nice looking site and an excellent idea. I'm sure there is a demand out there for this product! You should be very proud of the work you have done so far.

I think that I understand what you do, but my concern is that the people who feel this pain the most acutely might not. Have you considered shooting a video? That way, non technical people who are having this problem can go to your site, see what you mean by template, see what you mean by an API, and see the final result? Or, have you considered rewriting the front page to be completely from the perspective of a non-technical person, then include technical details on a developers page?

</comment><comment><USER13> here's how you promote it: focus on a very narrow market first because your current market is very broad and hard to attack. come up with one specific use case for this bad boy like invoices, and then narrow it even further, custom invoices for paypal, and then you have a tangible market you can start to attack, not an abstract one. my examples aren't probably the best, but you get the idea. excited for you!

the thing is to get some experience and momentum in getting a customer, which is very different than engineering code. lots of good will come out of it, and it will take you in directions you can't anticipate or imagine.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. Solid idea. Well executed. Demand Exists. But you need to narrow scope, at least initially. It would be very difficult to just focus on "invoices." Going up against some strong SEO competition there. Like jwheeler79 suggests, focusing on a very narrow market segment may be easier to gain some traction. There a tons of small sellers on Amazon, Ebay, etc., that may have very specific document needs that are not being met. They are probably using clunky, unprofessional solutions or trying to do it themselves. Find out what those needs are and very specifically market to them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I might consider using this if there was an SDK for Node.js or another platform that I was into. That call is not really complicated, but having an SDK ready to go would make it a much easier decision to try this out.

Also ODT is the most flexible but if I could log in, pick a pre-existing HTML- based template from a library of common things like invoices or whatever, and edit it in my account with Aloha Editor or CK Editor or something, that might be just fine unless I needed special headers or something.

Then the API call could just give the name of the template.

</comment><comment><USER16> Here's my contribution: I looked at the landing page for 5-10 seconds and I couldn't quite figure out what the product does. What is a "template" in your product's context? I understand "HTML to PDF" or maybe even "JSON to PDF", but what is "template" to PDF?

EDIT: Okay I see on your site a template is a "LibreOffice/OpenOffice document." I have no idea what that is. Maybe I'm just not your target audience?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you know JSON, you probably are somehow my target audience.

Imagine you could take your normal Word document and just put in some placeholders. Then send some JSON and this Word document (as a template) to my service. You would get a PDF in return.

Instead of MS-Word documents I use OpenOffice documents as templates.

OpenOffice is a word processor like MS-Word. Also a nice user interface etc. it is just build with different goals in mind.

<comment><USER17> That's a good point though. Could you handle .docx files? I bet a lot of your potential users (the managers more than the developers) would be in the same boat: use MS Word every day, but never heard of LibreOffice. Even though they could obviously install it and convert their template doc from Word, that adds a lot of friction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would definitely go for creating plugins for popular content management systems. You can then optimize landing pages for each CMS - people searching for "generate PDF from WordPress" etc.

People using a CMS solution are a really great market for you. They may well be on hosting that does not allow them to install serverside components to make generating PDFs easier. They may also have limited development skills - being more web designers or front end developers, so they couldn't solve this problem themselves.

You may well be able to get your plugin listed in the marketplace's or addon listings for the CMS solutions you are targeting, especially if there is some free limited mode.

As for advertising your product places. One way to not be spammy is to keep an eye on forums for people asking how to generate a PDF from their application. You then reply with how they would do that themselves via some open source script or whatever for their particular platform. It's a PITA on most platforms, so you can then drop in at the end that you have a service that does this. So you have given them some info on how to DIY as this is your specialist subject, but also dropped in a link for an easier way to do it via your service.

</comment><comment><USER19> Really, the issue is not your website, but maybe your current target audience (developers only)

You can really get some word of mouth by targeting individual communities that have a huge (but under served use case) - and writing out if ten box integrations for your service so that a power user or low level admin can install your plugin.

Two communities that might be interested:

Educational/LMS (specifically moodle, open source educational Learning Management System) - the web LMSes don't target printing of tests, just online testing. Quite a few teachers want to print out tests and have been using some serious kludges like moodle2word that involve having specific versions of word, installing templates, etc. This would be a godsend.

CMS and or Bloggers (ready to go wordpress (put shortcodes in a page), django, etc integrations) - lots of CMS data is dying for printouts...but there aren't any flexible printing services that allow for a customizable template — all I've found are glorified browser print buttons.

ERP also seems like a natural fit.

Anyways, it seems like you need to reach out to individual communites and try to work with them directly via their plugin repo's to get the ball rolling.

<comment><AUTHOR> Creation of specific plugins is a good idea. I guess I could build something generic for such platforms without much trouble.. great idea. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> My 2 cents - You have software built, now comes the challenging part of actually building a business around it. There are lots of things that you can do, I would suggest making all of the below equal priorities going forward:

\- Meet your customers needs: I don't really know what this means, make sure to hear from those that are using it right now, and those that will say that they will do it. You might end up getting feedback to add features like: a) Templates: You support only OpenOffice templates? I believe it should not be too hard to support more formats like RTF, Text Documents, and MS Office documents. b) API: Supporting Node.js, Java, and other languages. You might want to look at a site like Stripe.com for examples on how to structure developer documentation. c) Output: Perhaps supporting HTML outputs as well as PDFs.

\- Homepage: I think your homepage looks good, but can get much better. It might be a good idea to find similar/adjacent companies and see how they do their homepage. I think you should move the 'reasons to use' further up the page.

\- Pricing Page: Not sure if I really care about the number of servers running. Also, jobs per day - are you really expecting that many users? I think you might want to significantly reduce the amount of usage per day in each tier. I think you will also likely want to tier on different criteria - perhaps support, keeping a history of converted documents, and others that your users will ask for.

\- Conversion: Are you tracking what percentage of visitors are converting to signup? Are you trying A/B testing different prompts to them?

\- Driving Traffic: You could think about doing guest posts, blogging on your site, buying ads, and building integrations into other tools to drive traffic.

</comment><comment><USER21> While I understand the problem this solves, the landing page doesn't express confidence: "Reasons to use this template to pdf solution" should be just "Why using Template 2 PDF?" or just "Why" ... the reasons should be very brief:

* Your end users will be able to modify layouts themselves

* Minimal effort required for software developers

* Business stakeholders will obtain sharp, professional-looking documents, sooner

Minimal changes:

* Change "Features:" to "Features"

* Use "PDF", all in caps, consistently.

The UI theme is screaming for something more end-user friendly such as [http://bootswatch.com/lumen/](http://bootswatch.com/lumen/) or [http://bootswatch.com/flatly/](http://bootswatch.com/flatly/)

Also, I feel the landing page could benefit from a layout such as this: [http://getbootstrap.com/examples/justified- nav/](http://getbootstrap.com/examples/justified-nav/)

</comment><comment><USER22> Great!

I do understand the problem. The problem is real, and this seems like a great developer friendly way to solve it. In my mind, that could probably make it commercially viable by itself, but why don't go a step further? Solve it for non-developers as well:

I might have missed it (which could make it a UX flaw then), but there doesn't seem to be a way to upload tabular data in any form and use that on a template. Why not? You could make it work with csv, javascript supported grid, or maybe some easily parsable spreadsheet format.

Pricing is not my strong suit, so no real comment on that - only that adding an "upgrade account" button to accounts section would be nice.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER23> _How do you promote stuff without already established social media status while not behaving or feeling like a spammer?_

Find people who would have a self interest in promoting your stuff. You might have to tailor your story, but I mean things like sites that link to cool new stuff, the press, newsletters, etc. Anyone whose job it is to link to stuff like yours, that's who you want to know. Unfortunately your site isn't loading for me at the moment so I don't have any ideas, but just from the sound of it, Lifehacker might be one such place or even ProductHunt.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think you could work on the documentation a bit. Keep it succinct and informative to start with. I expect to just read the first paragraph and get to know, how to use it, or the hang of it. Better highlighting and formatting is in order, atleast in the "in words" section.

The details can go later. Impress the developer with how easy it is at first. If someones interested, they will fish out the details later. Just give an example and its output pdf on the first page maybe.

</comment><comment><USER25> > Use a LibreOffice/OpenOffice document as your template.

> The end-user will be happy, since he can create or modify pdf layouts > himself.

On a side note, can Word/Excel/PowerPoint generate LO/OO documents? I'd like to use a service like this, but have had really poor experiences translating word and excel documents to LO.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not in a way that an end user would not be frustrated at some point. I could read those files, but the output could be too different from what an end user would expect.

You are not the first one to ask about doing this in/for Microsoft land.. I'm working on this. If you drop me a mail, I would come back to you once there is something to see.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> There are several services (free and not) whose purpose it to help you in getting initial users and feedback. For instance, betalist.com and erlibird.com. (I have no affiliation with any of those, and perhaps there are more that I simply don't know).

As for your service, it looks down to me. :(

</comment><comment><USER27> Good to see there are other solutions out there for nice PDF generation. I open-sourced my code for generating LaTeX (and compile it to pdf's) using Python. This seems like a good solution for the less tech savy people.

</comment><comment><USER28> Some feedback on the design, you're using #000 for those hero images, I would tone them back to something lighter.

Contrast is important, but #000 against #fff is too harsh.

</comment><comment><USER29> You have a nice looking site, and figuring out what you do was very easy (good landing page).

On the pricing page, I'm a little confused on what 'servers' refers to. Is that the number of servers you are using, and if so, why do I care?

Overall, great work - I'll keep it in mind for the future!

</comment><comment><USER30> Let me try it without signing up! It will definitely increase your conversion rate.

</comment><comment><USER31> Webmerge.me is similar with lots of workflow options and salesforce intergration, how does yours differ?

</comment><comment><USER32> I can't figure out what your thing does. Is it like PrimoPDF?

</comment><comment><USER13> dude this idea is freaking genius. total no brainer

<comment><USER10> "freaking genius" and "total no brainer" sound kind of funny together, but yes - "genius" meaning great idea, and "no brainer" meaning the point is very clear on the landing page.</comment></comment>


The Seven Deadly Sins of Predicting the Future of AI (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://rodneybrooks.com/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-predicting-the-future-of-ai/ <comment><USER2> > Here is where we are on programs that can understand computer code. We > currently have no programs that can understand a one page program as well as > a new student in computer science can understand such a program after just > one month of taking their very first class in programming. That is a long > way from AI systems being better at writing AI systems than humans are.

Excellent point. As far as code is a form of model/theory building we do not have any form of AI that can build and work with theories on an ad-hoc basis like people can.</comment>


Hadoop use at Facebook  - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=16121578919&id=9445547199&index=0 <comment><USER2> Is it common to access data on a Hadoop system with SQL syntax? I haven't encountered a method like that yet. Where should I look?

<comment><USER3> they mentioned that they're open sourcing their system at some point soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Any hackers have deployed hadoop themselves? How much of a pain is it?

<comment><USER5> There isn't any pain. Best of all it's easy to setup hadoop on a single machine, or two machines here and there and then them into a large cluster:

Here's a good tutorial that may help: [http://www.michael- noll.com/wiki/Running_Hadoop_On_Ubuntu_Li...](http://www.michael- noll.com/wiki/Running_Hadoop_On_Ubuntu_Linux_%28Single-Node_Cluster%29)

(If you're using a Linux machine just follow that; otherwise get VMWare running Ubuntu and set it up there).</comment></comment>


10 Unbelievable Online CSS Tools To Make Your Designing Life Easier - <AUTHOR> http://jeez.eu/2009/09/21/10-unbelievable-online-css-tools-to-make-your-designing-life-easier/ <comment><USER2> Wow - there's no excuse for bad css anymore...</comment>


Community for Artists - <AUTHOR> https://www.artup.io <comment><AUTHOR> We are launching our community for artists for iOS very soon. If you want early access then visit our website to get the app.</comment>