Patreon

A reader who is a member of your Patreon campaign can open every locked chapter, without buying coins, for as long as they stay a member. They can also earn coins each month on top, if you want them to.

It is set up at Monetization ▸ Settings ▸ Patreon, in three cards: the connection, the rules, and the tiers. The first is the only one that has to be filled in.

Before you start

Two things on Patreon’s side, both free:

1. A campaign with at least one paid tier. That is your ordinary Patreon page.
2. A registered client, from patreon.com/portal/registration/register-clients. This tells Patreon that your website is allowed to ask about memberships.

Patreon Connection

Every field on this card carries a description and, where Patreon is the source, a Get this from Patreon link that opens the exact page.

Client ID and Client Secret identify your website to Patreon. Both come from the client you registered, on the same screen. Without both, Patreon stays off whatever the switch says.

Creator Access Token is how the site learns which campaign is yours. That is what tells a membership for you apart from a membership for somebody else, so without it, and without a Campaign ID, nobody is granted anything and readers who really are members are told their membership could not be verified. It also supplies the currency your prices are shown in and the join link readers follow. Patreon gives it to you on the same screen as the Client ID.

Campaign ID is optional, and only useful if you would rather not store a token at all. It is the number in the address of your campaign page in the developer portal. Setting it lets memberships be verified without your site calling Patreon. Leave it empty and the token finds it for you.

Creator Username is the name in your Patreon address, patreon.com/thisbit. It is only used to build the join link when there is no token. With a token the link comes from Patreon itself and cannot be mistyped.

Redirect URI is the one value that travels the other way. Copy it from this card into your Patreon client’s settings. If it does not match exactly, a reader clicking “Continue with Patreon” gets an error from Patreon rather than from you, which is a confusing place to debug.

Access Rules

Everything here already has a sensible default. You can leave the whole card alone and Patreon will work.

Min Tier (cents) is the smallest membership that unlocks chapters. 300 is 3.00 in your Patreon currency. This setting decides access on its own, and that is worth being clear about, because the Tiers card further down looks like it ought to. It does not: tiers decide only how many coins a membership earns. A member paying above Min Tier but below Tier 1 reads everything and earns nothing.

Verify Frequency (days) is how often the site asks Patreon about a member again. A cancellation is only noticed when somebody asks, and readers do not press Refresh on their own. Checks run daily in the background, oldest first, a batch at a time, so a large campaign spreads itself out instead of hitting Patreon’s rate limit.

Grace Period (days) is how long somebody keeps reading after their membership stops qualifying, whether they cancelled or moved down a tier. Coins stop immediately; chapters last this long. Fourteen days is generous and costs almost nothing, and it covers the ordinary case of a card that failed and was fixed two days later.

Grace Notifications tells them it is happening, rather than letting the access vanish one morning with no explanation.

Allow Manual Refresh puts a Refresh button on their wallet, so somebody who just joined does not have to wait for the next scheduled check.

Allow Unlink lets a reader disconnect their Patreon account themselves.

Reverify on Access rechecks the membership every time a locked chapter is opened. Accurate to the second, and an extra call to Patreon per chapter view. Leave it off unless you have a specific reason.

Patreon Tiers

Three rows. Each is an amount in cents and the coins a member at or above that amount earns each month.

Only the highest matching row applies: a member at 1000 with rows at 300, 500 and 1000 earns the Tier 3 coins, not all three added together.

This card is optional. If you only want members to read locked chapters, leave it alone and set Min Tier above.

What a reader sees

The wallet tells them where they stand, and it has a different thing to say for each state a membership can be in: never joined, joined and active, joined but below your minimum, cancelled but still inside the grace period, payment failed, and a few more. All of them are in what readers see.

Things that catch people out

Custom pledge amounts have no tier. A supporter who typed their own amount instead of picking a tier is a member with no entitled tier, and will not qualify. This is Patreon’s behaviour, not JormunTL’s.

Amounts are in your campaign’s currency. Min Tier and the tier rows are compared against the campaign currency, so a campaign in euro should have euro amounts here.

Nothing works until both the Client ID and the Client Secret are saved. The enable switch is not enough, and the card says so above it.