Apple forces Patreon to pay 30% of new memberships sold through iOS

Patreon is a service that lets content creators have members who pay a subscription to receive exclusive content. Up to now, it has been able to do this via its iOS app without incurring Apple's regular fees.

In a blog post — and now also emails to its users — Patreon has announced that it is about to be forced to pay the 30% fee.

"Unfortunately, Apple is requiring us to switch over to their in-app purchase system for all iOS transactions or else risk being kicked out of the App Store altogether," writes the company, "and their in-app purchase system is not built with our same level of creator-first flexibility."

This is not the first time that Patreon has warned users the change is coming. It initially announced in December 2023 that Apple would be applying the fee to new memberships from November 2024.

"Before we go any further, we want to be crystal clear about one thing: Apple's fee will not impact your existing members," says the company. "It will only affect new memberships purchased in the iOS app from November onward."

As the November date approaches, Patreon has issued advice to its creator users on managing the change. Central to this is that if a creator on Patreon chooses to do nothing, the service will default to automatically increasing prices in the iOS app to compensate for the fee.

However, Patreon is also giving creators the option to keep their membership prices as they were, and instead absorb the fee. "We don't recommend this, because it means you'd earn less per membership on in-app iOS transactions," says the company, "but ultimately we believe it's important to give you agency to make your own decisions."

There's no change for existing memberships. Plus the change will only affect new members who sign up via the iOS app — and previously Patreon CEO Jack Conte has said only "tiny portion of pledges" are made this way.

There's no obvious reason why Patreon hasn't always had to pay the App Store's regular 30% in-app purchase fee for its memberships. In 2021, Conte even said publicly that he didn't know why it was exempt.