Hi everyone,

The prepaid plan, which used to be exclusive to business users, is now available to everyone in the EU.

Why only the EU? Well, there’s two reasons:

  • I need to report taxes in each country where I do business. Normally Patreon does this for me, but because the prepaid plan does not use Patreon I need to do it manually. The EU’s One Stop Shop system makes it easy to report taxes in 27 EU member states (sorry England, you brought this upon yourselves).
  • My credit card application got rejected, this limits me to smaller regional providers like iDEAL, SOFORT and SEPA. No reason was specified for the rejection, but I guess it’s because pixeldrain does not publish a terms of service and a privacy policy. I do not have the time to set up documents like that. I’ll try applying for the credit card system again when the documentation is in place.

There are a couple of differences between the prepaid system and Patreon subscriptions:

  • Prepaid subscriptions can be cancelled and resumed on a day-to-day basis. This means that you’re never stuck to a fixed monthly price.
  • The base price is lower (€2 / month), but you get charged separately for bandwidth usage (at €2 per TB) and storage usage (at €4 per TB per month). If you use very little this can be cheaper. And if you use a lot it can also be cheaper because you’re never paying for capacity which you’re not using.
  • There are no storage or bandwidth limits except the ones which you configure yourself.
  • There are no automatic recurring payments. You will be notified though e-mail if your balance runs out. If you do not top up your balance within 6 days the prepaid subscription will disable itself.
  • Files don’t expire because you’re paying for storage directly.

For a full comparison of all features look at the feature table on the home page.

If you’d like to switch from Patreon to the new prepaid plan you must first deposit some credit on the deposit page. Then you can activate the prepaid plan on the subscriptions page. Activating prepaid will not disable your Patreon subscription. If you wish to cancel your Patreon membership you need to do that through Patreon.

Thanks for your support!

Wim.