I’ve got 2 Patreons running for silly little side projects and they both had a few people subscribed and donating and I appreciate those people but for reasons I wanted to stop people from contributing currency and use the platform as a free communication tool instead.
- Patreon does not allow you to make an existing tier cost $0. That would have been nice and easy.
- Patreon does not allow you to move a user to another tier. That would have been nice and easy.
- Patreon does allow you to pause billing for a month. Only a month and it automatically restarts.
- Patreon does allow you to deactivate a tier. New users won’t be join that pay tier.
- Patreon does allow you to delete a tier. It warns you that users will lose access to benefits.
- Patreon does allow you to block users from the project. You can unblock them and they can join again if they want.
- Patreon does allow you to deactivate your project. If you reactivate it all the users subscriptions will continue as if nothing happened.
- Patreon does allow you to completely shutdown your project. Kill it totally. Game over.
So I did the obvious thing after reading the documentation available and knowing that I wanted to permanently shutdown the pay tiers so I deleted the tier. It showed up in my dashboard that those users were now no longer in a tier. I thought my work was done. But no. Buried in another document is this gem.
When a tier is deleted, existing members from that tier will still be billed their membership amount.
So I had people who not in any tier still getting billed. People just floating around with no tier getting billed for something. Which left me with the only other reasonable option to block and unblock users and hope that things workout.
To my surprise it worked well enough. When a user is blocked they don’t show up in any of the normal reports and you can’t contact them. When you unblock them they show up exactly as they did before. They have a cancelled timestamp on thier account from when I hit the block and an access expiration that is based on the last successful subscription event. They retain some membership status.
I’ve also paused billing as a stopgap but it seems like I should see all the users drop out of the paid membership status over the next couple of weeks even without it.