Ok, this will be kind of confusing because I don't have a handle on it quite yet. However, because of recent Patreon news, I will probably make steps to move away from it. Not sure how yet as a lot of those Patreons aren't even forum members and we will lose what little amount of money we get from them.
So that leaves me with only two other options at this point, and that is Bold memberships and straight donations... both done via Paypal. I am setup to do both, I just don't have visible links for them on the site yet.
My issue is I am not sure how to handle it as I want to keep the Bold monthly cost low, but I have also gotten many messages that I am underselling or that people want to donate more than just $1 a month. This is already do-able with our current format, but kind of confusing as it would mean someone having to maintain TWO re-occurring payments to the site (One for their $1 Bold membership and another for the amount they actually wanted to pay a month).
So that got me thinking... what I may do is make three tiers of Bold. The $1 a month, $2 a month and a $5 a month. The only thing is that currently I don't have anything extra to offer the two higher tiers. I'm not going to downgrade the perks for the $1 a month, so that would mean I need to offer something more for the $2 and $5 that Bold members do not currently have. Then I can also just have a straight Donate with a running total each month for those who just feel like helping out, Bold member already or not.
Any suggestions on this? Since we lost some of our stuff because of the forum upgrade, I figured the higher tiers may get a little extra like name changing, styling, automatic entries into monthly giveaways. Fuck, I don't know. Throw some shit at me so I can think about what we can do or not.
So that leaves me with only two other options at this point, and that is Bold memberships and straight donations... both done via Paypal. I am setup to do both, I just don't have visible links for them on the site yet.
My issue is I am not sure how to handle it as I want to keep the Bold monthly cost low, but I have also gotten many messages that I am underselling or that people want to donate more than just $1 a month. This is already do-able with our current format, but kind of confusing as it would mean someone having to maintain TWO re-occurring payments to the site (One for their $1 Bold membership and another for the amount they actually wanted to pay a month).
So that got me thinking... what I may do is make three tiers of Bold. The $1 a month, $2 a month and a $5 a month. The only thing is that currently I don't have anything extra to offer the two higher tiers. I'm not going to downgrade the perks for the $1 a month, so that would mean I need to offer something more for the $2 and $5 that Bold members do not currently have. Then I can also just have a straight Donate with a running total each month for those who just feel like helping out, Bold member already or not.
Any suggestions on this? Since we lost some of our stuff because of the forum upgrade, I figured the higher tiers may get a little extra like name changing, styling, automatic entries into monthly giveaways. Fuck, I don't know. Throw some shit at me so I can think about what we can do or not.