Patreon Rewards: How top creators are pricing their reward tiers

Every now and again it’s helpful to look at the current Patreon creator landscape and see how reward tiers are being priced. Top Patreon creators have generally had the time to hone in their rewards pricing, so it’s a solid baseline for understanding what’s working and what’s not working.

So we looked at the top 25 creators in each category to see how rewards are being priced out.

Observations:

• While Patreon’s official recommendation for reward tiers these days is to start at $5 (and to definitely not have a $1 tier), clearly there’s huge variations in minimum pricing depending on the creator category. The $5 tier is the clear standard for podcasts, but comics have a much lower average, with a good number of creators who still have a $1 tier.
• NSFW photos holds the highest average tier price, but it’s important to note that the subscriber counts for this category are significantly lower than every other category. So it’s likely that even though the audience for these creators may not be big, there’s a higher willingness to pay initially.

Observations:

Pretty much every creator is using the “recommended” or “most popular” highlighting to feature their middle tier. The sedan of reward tiers, you might say. Not surprising.

Observations:

3D printing creators had the highest occurrence of having just one tier (priced at mostly $10/mo), but other than that, all categories had only 3-4 categories. Honestly given how Patreon's layout only shows 3 rewards (the rest you have to toggle to), it makes sense that creators are being pushed to max out at 3.

Notes:

• We did look at highest priced tiers as well, but there were too many tiers that creators clearly just set up for fun. In case you’re curious, the max looks to be $15K/mo. No telling if anyone has actually subscribed to these tiers.
• These insights are pulled from the top 25 creators in each category (ranked by number of patrons) according to Graphtreon. Reward tiers that were sold out were excluded from the count.

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Written by Naomi @ Okoa. Okoa is an email marketing and analytics platform for Patreon creators. Okoa increases Patreon income by converting more free members to paid, recovering declines, and reactivating former patrons. Interested in increasing your Patreon income with less work? Try Okoa for free.