every month since I started using Patreon, after payout day I see a substantial drop in subscription totals, a few hundred bucks worth. I always figured this was because people get charged on the first, then go "oh shit Patreon I forgot to cancel" and then go cancel. A week later it's back up to normal levels, and I assumed this too was just due to subscriber churn.
The thing is, patreons website is so bad, so unbelievably shitty and counter to anything anyone wants it to be, that there's simply nowhere you can go that will let you answer these questions. There should be a single page that simply lists all signups and cancellations; there isn't. You have to synthesize this info manually from six different sources, which I've also learned can just be wrong. So the data doesn't exist, and all you can do is float in limbo and hope you're right about next months rent
As a separate issue, I realized a couple months ago that if you go into your list of patrons and filter by tier, it shows you cancelled patrons. I've been delivering benefits (minimal though mine are) to people who cancelled a year ago. You have to manually select "Active" under sub status. Again, this website does absolutely nothing the way anyone would want it to.
Yesterday I put these facts together at last and realized that patreon is subtracting the fucking declined payments from my subscriber total. Yeah, declines, the thing that VERY REGULARLY happens on automatic payments and usually gets resolved within a couple days? Yeah that. Patreon stops counting them as subscribers and makes you think you just lost a ton of RECURRING revenue due to a fucking TEMPORARY PAYMENT FAILURE
this website is run by ghouls
and their customer support is equally as ghoulish.
Don't ask me how I know, I just do, lmao
