I just achieved the pretty cool goal of $500 per month today and was getting ready to make a post about it, but when I refreshed my page the total monthly amount on my main page had dropped waaay back to $350. I haven’t lost any patrons so I’m really confused (and alarmed, if that’s a genuine number!) as to why it would change so drastically so suddenly. The maths don’t quite add up!
Anyone else had this, or know what might be causing it?
Have you checked how much has processed for you and if there are declines so far this month? (I find my total goes down if there are declines and sometimes just generally when processing starts.)
I can’t see any declines noted for the recent processing period. I wasn’t quite at the full $500 when processing started for May, but was tipped over when a patron increased their pledge amount and another new person joined. No one else has altered the amount they’ve pledged at all.
Hmm! This may either be related to the bug being discussed elsewhere, or it could be fraudulent patrons that were removed, or something else.
I don’t have the ability to look up highly detailed information about your personal account - but you can always reach out to our Community Happiness team to have them dig into this: https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
Thank you! I’ve actually been very lucky and not encountered many fraudulent patrons (I charge up front), so to drop $150 in a single shot is quite a shock! I’ll definitely reach out to see if this can be looked into.
In my experience this happens every month for the 1-3 day period between when the month’s pledges START to be charged to when all the charges clear the various credit cards/banks.
It’s always a little bit confusing.
The way I understand it is, if you had $500 in pledges but then a $50 pledge declined on someone’s card, your page would/should show $450 - to accurately reflect what you actually make this month, even though $500 was pledged. But during the period when cards start getting charged, the charges don’t all clear immediately, and since Patreon doesn’t KNOW if you’ll have that money, the display widget acts as if you don’t.
Patreon Product team: I’ve said this before in product feedback on the site itself, but I’d love to see this fixed in some way that gave a little transparency into the process for both patrons and creators. Here’s how I would fix it:
Except I’d get a real copywriter to write something for that info tip that makes more sense.
Something like that would make so much more sense! I’ve never seen the numbers dip quite that much during a processing period (hence the embarrassing flap), but maybe I just caught it at a weird time. It also makes it awkward when you achieve a goal around processing time and get a flurry of congratulations messages from patrons, only for it to slide back down again and you have to reply with “false alarm, whoops!”
My patrons are mostly a bunch of other starving artists, so I see the dip every month heh. 
Thanks for the call out - the copy could definitely be clearer here and this could be something we address better long term in the interface itself. I just shared this with the head of design because we’ve been specifically looking for places where we can improve the copy in the product itself.