Slowclap Design Philosophy: Fees

I really appreciate that many of you have the insight to understand that any platform can’t subsist entirely on goodwill. Slowclap is a business and its one I’m hoping can become my primary business someday, and that obviously requires making money somehow. That shouldn’t be a particulary surprising statement, but there’s a strong undercurrent on the internet of people expecting things to be free.

I think we’re pretty deeply into an era of computing where we can all see the problems with this line of thinking. Enshittification, to borrow the term from Cory Doctorow is the inevitable byproduct of this business model. And it’s worsened by VC backed businesses that draw people in with “too good to be true” engagement bait and then slowly find ways to wring value from those users. We could keep playing this game, trying to jump from platform to platform as they become untenable, but it doesn’t lead anywhere good. Or we could try and do what I’m doing:

Build small and build sustainable.

There are tradeoffs with this model. Features will come slower, occasional bugs may be slightly less occasional. The platform will always remain more “minimalist”

But I’m not interested in drawing anyone in with a false promise. Slowclap is a subscription platform. It costs $5. I take a cut. It’s free for creators while the audience is growing, but the goal is that everyone on the platform should be on equal footing. A community of creators supporting each other.

But how do those fees work?

Stripe, the payment processor that secures all your transactions. Takes a flat fee plus a percentage of every transaction. After that, I take between somewhere between .40 and .75 cents depending on the subscription. That variance isn’t based on how much you pay, it’s based on rounding applause so it stays a clean number. I get excited to see higher tier subs because it means more money is going to creators. It makes no difference to me financially which tier you pick.

Other companies take a percentage cut, you give more, they take more. I don’t do that and I don’t plan to. If I offer higher tiers in the future (or one off applause purchases) my philosophy will remain the same. Flat fee per transaction, plus stripe fees, rounded to be straightforward.

Stripe also charges a fee when creators get paid out, but I made a choice early on when designing slowclap that I didn’t want people to have to deal with those. This is the only reason the payout threshold is $100. So I can afford to absorb those fees. In the future, I may let people pay that fee (it’s $2) to get their money early. But it will be optional, and there will always be a path for creators to get 100% of their applause.

This is a less lucrative model than most others in the patronage business. It would be natural to think that’s because I’m in “audience building” mode. It isn’t. It’s because I think a smaller platform with more focused features and flat fees is better for everyone. I can’t predict what Stripe fees will be in the future, and I’m obviously always going to be running Slowclap as a business, but not a business focused on profit. One focused on sustainability.

I think most people will think this model is fair, which is why I put the fees up front, at purchase time, rather than hiding them or pushing them onto creators.

I’m trying to make money. I’m trying to make you more. I think my fees reflect that.