Sorry, missed this with all the ONC stuff going on. Donated a bit, hopefully it will keep the forum up a little longer and smooth transition to Discord.
5 Likes
Thanks for your donation! 
2 Likes
Well, it really doesn’t help that most the platform space is owned by subsidiaries of Amazon (last I checked). That means it’s not just inflation, it’s a monopoly, which is not good for competitive costs.
2 Likes
Holy cow Domi, thank you for that donation! That was so incredibly generous!
4 Likes
Sorry if someone has already mentioned/elaborated on it, but my immediate thought was also Patreon. AFAIK, the main difference is that Patreon allows people to donate to you monthly and they only need to sign up once (whereas Ko-Fi is more like a tip jar). You as the account holder can set up donation tiers anywhere from I believe $1 upwards. Patrons can also easily cancel their monthly donations at any time should our circumstances change. Since the forum requires a monthly fee, having a number of people contribute to that each month might help significantly.
5 Likes
Yup, we’ve looked into it a little bit, but honestly we’d probably need at least a $5 dollar donation for it to count towards anything after fees and we would probably have a difficult time keeping up with monthly rewards. Not sure if those are mandatory tbh, but I think you need to provide some form of content for the subscription to be valid. We haven’t completely scrapped the idea, we just don’t have a big enough following at the moment for that to pay off.
3 Likes
You can offer rewards, but it’s not mandatory… Just make sure it’s clear in the tier description that it doesn’t come with any rewards. Or you’re rewarded with something like boasting rights for being a patron (lol), or even just a patron sticker on whackys or something like that. There is no internal checking from Patreon or something that you’re dishing out rewards. In my experience, some people are just super kind and want to donate. My upper tier patrons haven’t even claimed any of their rewards, even though the offer is there every single month.
4 Likes
Oh, I see…that’s good to know! It’s definitely one of the more sustainable long-term options, just having people sign up once on a platform they’re already familiar with.
And how do you find it in terms of admin fees? Do you still make a reasonable “profit”? That’s what put me off when I went poking around, because having something like 50 people donate $2 every month would be ideal, I’m just not sure how much we could actually cash in from that.
3 Likes
Yeah, that’s the thing… for me I set up Patreon with no specific targets or goals (and definitely not so I can quit my day job and rely on patrons, lol), so anything I get from there is a profit. They charge a fee per patron; I believe 5% payment fee + 10 cents platform fee for anyone pledging below $3, and 2.9% payment fee + 30 cents platform fee for pledges above that.
Just to give a rough idea, I see in my PayPal account about 82% of all the total monthly pledges after all fees (payment, platform, and transfer costs). But of course this would fluctuate with how many patrons you have, their pledges, etc.
3 Likes
Also keep in mind I’m a really low-profile writer on Wattpad with no marketing, very niche audience… so getting 50 patrons at the same time each month would be practically impossible for me. I don’t know how big the Wackys community is, their age range (and hence ability to pledge), so I’m not sure how likely or how soon such a target will be met. That’s not to dissuade you, but just to keep it honest, since I don’t know too many small-time creators making the big bucks there.
4 Likes
Yeah, of course, that’s why I was just gonna say we might need to still hold off on that until we build a semblance of a following, if we can pull it off 
50 or so patrons would be the ideal, and I think we’d need to make at least $15-20 for it to make a difference. Not sure how easy that is to make.
But thank you for taking the time to explain things! It really helps us figure out options 
3 Likes
No worries! You can tag me any time if you have any more questions (not that I’m a Patreon expert or anything, lol). But just one last thing; you might be surprised! I hit a monthly pledge of over $15 within my first… was it 3 or 4 months… of opening my Patreon account (God bless that one person who’s donating at an upper tier—I still don’t even know who they are to this day!) (edited to add: no, wtf was that, God bless ALL my patrons, lol) so if I can hit that as a nobody wattpad writer, I’m sure a big community like WW can meet it, too.
4 Likes
Thank you!! That’s really great news 
3 Likes
I definitely took having a forum for granted. After Wattpad shut theirs down I was referred right to here. I made a small donation to the GoFundMe but we certainly need a long term solution. I like the idea I saw somewhere in this thread of a book being featured on the WW homepage for a price. If WW went with a premium subscription for a couple bucks a month, a perk of that could be to enter one of their stories each month (with perhaps 4 genre groups cycling each month, each week one story winning the featured space) I would gladly commit to being one of the judges for such a contest.
6 Likes
My pleasure!
3 Likes
Just wanted to clear it up. Ko-fi has monthly option too, btw.
Ko-fi takes no fee (unless you get a premium account). The only fee comes from whichever service you set up the payment with (there are a few to choose from).
I don’t know how that compares with Patreon fees.
7 Likes
The Discourse forum software itself also offers a “subscription” option, usually in return for access to a special category or something. We have it installed, but haven’t used it.
7 Likes
Oh that’s interesting. The fees on Ko-fi will 100% be lower than Patreon, I assume even if the account owner was grandfathered in and has lower fees on the new structure… interesting!
3 Likes
Oh this is really sad… 
After Wattpad was gone, this place is like our new home. This forum got everything that we could ever wanted, from the massive word count per post, all the fancy coding, and the most friendly community ever. Unfortunately, we’re not well-known to the public, so it’s hard to gain newcomer, and that’s why I understand why we struggle getting any sort of income here. It’s a shame really, but at least, the fact that we’re not mainstream, is the reason why this little community stay so wholesome until the end… 
Farewell Wackywriters, you’re one of the best and will always be remembered! 
5 Likes
No clue if any of my old friends are still on here but it’s sad to see this place go now
I haven’t been active for like a year but I’m still happy to see that y’all came very far, and we all had a good run 
4 Likes