What This Calculator Does
Most Patreon fee tools show you the fee on a single pledge amount. But creators with multiple membership tiers — a $5 community tier, a $15 supporter tier, and a $50 inner-circle tier — need to see their real monthly picture across the entire roster at once.
This planner lets you model up to 8 tiers simultaneously. Enter each tier's monthly price and current (or projected) patron count, choose your fee plan, and see gross pledges, every deducted fee, and true net payout — broken down per tier and totalled.
How to Use This Calculator
- Choose your plan. Select Standard (10%) if you created your page after August 4, 2025. Choose Legacy Pro (8%) if you created before that date and have kept your page continuously published. Use Founders (5%) if you qualified for the original 2019 plan.
- Set your international patron share. If roughly 15% of your patrons pay in a currency different from your payout currency, enter 15. Patreon charges a 2.5% conversion fee on those pledges.
- Enter your tiers. Give each tier a name, monthly price, and active patron count. Use the + Add tier button for additional tiers (up to 8).
- Read the results. The KPI cards show total gross, total fees, and monthly net. The table breaks it down per tier so you can see which tiers contribute the most net revenue and which have the worst effective fee rate.
Understanding Patreon's Fee Layers
Platform fee
This is Patreon's direct cut. New creators (pages published after August 4, 2025) pay a flat 10%. Legacy Pro creators pay 8%. Legacy Founders pay 5%. This fee is applied to each successfully processed pledge amount before taxes.
Payment processing fee
Patreon routes payments through Stripe and PayPal. For pledges over $3, the rate is 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. For pledges $3 and under, the micro-transaction rate is 5% + $0.10. The fixed per-transaction component ($0.30 or $0.10) is why low-price tiers have disproportionately high effective rates — a $0.30 charge is 6% of a $5 pledge but only 0.6% of a $50 pledge.
Currency conversion fee
When a patron pays in a currency that differs from your payout currency, Patreon applies a 2.5% conversion fee. This is estimated in this tool as a weighted share of your total pledges based on your input international patron percentage.
What's NOT in this calculator
Apple IAP charges (30%) apply to patrons who subscribe via iPhone or iPad; these can be significant if a large portion of your audience is iOS-native. Payout fees (small wire-transfer costs) also apply when withdrawing, but these are small for most creators. Declined payments produce zero revenue and are excluded automatically by Patreon's system.
Tier Pricing Strategy Insights
The breakdown table shows the effective fee rate (total fees ÷ gross) for each tier. Compare these across your tiers — you'll typically find that your lowest-priced tier has the worst effective rate due to the $0.30 fixed processing fee. Consider whether a very low price point (e.g. $1–$3) is worth the high fee overhead, or whether raising the floor to $5+ significantly improves net yield per patron.
For creators on the legacy 8% Pro plan: every dollar above ~$300/month in patron upgrades from lower tiers to higher tiers is worth more in net terms, since higher pledge amounts amortise the $0.30 fixed charge more efficiently.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Patreon calculate creator fees across multiple tiers?
Patreon deducts fees at the individual pledge level, not on a blended total. Each patron's pledge is charged a platform fee plus a processing fee independently. A creator with 100 patrons at $5 and 20 patrons at $50 pays the $0.30 processing charge 120 times — once per patron, each billing cycle — rather than once on the combined total. This makes multi-tier modelling essential for accurate income planning.
Why does the per-pledge processing fee hurt small-tier patrons more?
The $0.30 fixed component of the 2.9% + $0.30 processing fee is the same regardless of pledge size. On a $5 pledge it represents 6% of the pledge. On a $50 pledge it's 0.6%. For pledges at $3 or below, Patreon uses a micro-transaction rate of 5% + $0.10 instead — which reduces the fixed bite slightly for very low amounts, but the effective rate is still much higher than larger pledges face.
What is the difference between Patreon's standard and legacy fee plans?
Creators who published their page after August 4, 2025 are on the standard 10% platform fee. Creators who published on or before that date and have kept their page continuously published may retain legacy rates (Pro: 8%, Founders: 5%). If a legacy creator unpublishes their page for any reason, they permanently lose the grandfathered rate and move to 10% when they republish.
Does Patreon charge an extra fee for international patrons?
Yes. When a patron pays in a currency different from the creator's payout currency, Patreon applies a 2.5% currency conversion fee on top of the platform and processing fees. This can meaningfully reduce net revenue for creators with large international audiences. The international patron % input in this calculator lets you model the blended impact across all your tiers based on your estimated share of cross-currency pledges.
Why doesn't my actual Patreon payout exactly match this calculator?
Several factors can cause variance: declined payments (failed charges are never paid out), partial-month pledges from mid-cycle new patrons, refunds, Apple in-app purchase fees (30%) for iOS subscribers, and rounding differences in Patreon's own system. This calculator provides a directionally accurate planning estimate — use it for budgeting and tier-pricing decisions, not as a guarantee of exact payout amounts.
How do I find how many patrons I have on each tier?
Log in to Patreon, go to your Creator Dashboard, then navigate to Membership → Tiers. Each tier shows its current active patron count. For this calculator, use those live figures for the most accurate projection. You can also use projected patron counts to model growth scenarios or decide whether adding a new tier at a specific price point improves your total monthly net.