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Patreon pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives

Patreon (patreon.com) is a community platform. Free to start with no monthly subscription; Patreon takes a 10% platform fee on creator earnings plus separate payment processing and payout fees.. Free plan: No monthly fee: free members can follow, see free posts and join creator-opened chats; Patreon only charges once you earn..

What Patreon costs

  • 100 paid members: $100/mo ($0 subscription + 10% platform fee x $1,000 = $100; payment processing is charged separately and not counted)
  • 1,000 paid members: $1,000/mo ($0 subscription + 10% x $10,000 = $1,000; team member/moderator access is included at no charge)
  • 1,000 free members: free (Free members and community chat/comments cost nothing; fees only apply to paid memberships)

Plan compared: Standard creator plan (10% platform fee, no subscription). Monthly USD on monthly billing (annual-only plans divided by 12) to run a community of a given size, including the platform's own fees on member payments but not standard card processing; WordPress plugins are priced on their licence without hosting, and forum software sold both ways on the vendor's hosted plan. The headline is 100 members paying $10 a month; we also compare 1,000 paying members ($10,000 a month, 2 admins) and a free community of 1,000 members.

What Patreon does

Core: Paid memberships & subscriptions.

Important: Discussion community (partly), Member mobile apps, Email marketing broadcasts (partly), Paid Discord/Slack access (partly), Shop, tips and products.

Also has: Real-time chat (partly), Members-only site content (partly), Events and live rooms (partly), Custom domain and branding (partly), Creator discovery marketplace, Member directory and profiles (partly), Public SEO forum (partly), SSO and embedding (partly), Integrations and API (partly).

Patreon price hikes

Cheaper alternatives to Patreon

At 100 members paying $10 a month, Patreon costs $100/mo. 1 community platform costs less:

  • Skool: $50/mo (Hobby), covers 57% of Patreon; missing or partial: Paid memberships & subscriptions (partly), Paid Discord/Slack access, Shop, tips and products, Members-only site content, Custom domain and branding

Patreon alternatives: 3 community platforms compared, at every size.

Every change we logged

  • Aug 2025 · Price increase: Patreon announced in June 2025 that new creators pay a single 10% platform fee, replacing the Lite (5%), Pro (8%) and Premium (12%) plans. A new creator who would have used Pro now pays $100 instead of $80 on $1,000 a month.

Sources

Pricing page: patreon.com/pricing. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. The 10% fee is from patreon.com/pricing; the support fee pages were blocked (403/Cloudflare). The 2025 change is sourced from Wikipedia, which gives the June 2025 announcement. The August 2025 effective date and the legacy 5/8/12% split come from prior knowledge and could not be re-verified because the web search budget was used up.