For many years after its 2013 launch Patreon had flat pricing, 5% of creator income earned on the platform.
Then in 2019 they changed it to a confusing tiered system, where all tiers were higher: 8%, 10%, and 12%.
In 2025, Patreon changed it once more, to eliminate the tiers and permanently raise prices to 10% for everyone (with some people grandfathered in, for now).
Substack started with the higher 10% pricing, perhaps realizing they could get away with it from the jump.
As a person who has for years been studying and writing about cooperatively owned enterprises (businesses that are owned by their members and exist purely for their benefit rather than to generate profit for shareholders), I've routinely found myself musing that platforms like Patreon and Substack etc are the perfect fit to be cooperatives. Since the creators on Patreon and Substack etc potentially make their entire living on the platform and use it on a regular basis, they have exactly the kind of regular involvement and vested interest that makes a cooperative work wonderfully.
I think it's a no-brainer there should be a cooperatively owned creator platform, and I'm going to build it.
And importantly, this cooperative will be even more democratic and accountable to its members than most, because of the innovative democratic systems that will form its foundation.
I formed Unbreaking Lab to incubate efforts like this. Its purpose and mission is to create both the open source software and legal templates that will form the basis of these new adaptively governed cooperatives, and to help found and build the cooperatives themselves.
How would this cooperative creator platform work?
Why would a creator choose to join a cooperative like this one? What will the benefits be?
- Pricing will be 5% of creator income at maximum. As the cooperative gains economies of scale, the fee will automatically reduce to proportionally share the actual cost of operations across creators. No shareholders taking a cut anymore.
- All features will be fully available to all creators from their inception and into perpetuity. No tiers or gates.
- The entire platform will be open source and developed in public, so members can see and contribute to the code they're relying on.
- Any costs that aren't incurred by all creators (such as for hosting large media files or video streaming) will just be passed through directly, meaning the individual member will just pay the actual incurred cost of those activities rather than raising fees for everyone. These actual compute costs tend to be very small (truly cents per month), and don't justify fee raises for infrastructure not everyone uses.
- And of course as mentioned above, the creators who actually use the platform will legally own it, and be able to adaptively vote to replace the board, CEO, and governing bylaws.
The last point about governance might seem boring or unimportant to you, but it's absolutely the most critical part of the model. If the creators don't own and control the platform, then the only leverage they can wield against the corporate owners is to threaten to leave. And in a platform like this there are massive and painful switching costs that make the threat of leaving pretty hollow, thus forming the core engine of possible enshittification.
A cooperative is structurally different. Since you and your fellow creators literally own and control the platform, it is inherently oriented toward you and your best interests. You control who the CEO and board are, you control the legal bylaws, you control the feature prioritization, you control everything. Once the cooperative is up and running sustainably, it will always exist as long as the owners find it useful. This structural change drives the organization to get better and better over time, rather than decaying as shareholders tighten their grip.
For me, this is only the beginning
I've long had ideas for more ambitious forms of crowdfunding, from incrementally accountable project funding to pooled democratic allocation to true assurance contracts. I'm intentionally starting with a creator platform since the business model is already proven, leaving much more room and security to innovate on the incredibly important governance aspects.
Once the core platform is self-sustaining, I'll ask the members to continue to trust me as I build other more experimental funding mechanisms and see what effect they have on the world. And if the members aren't impressed or don't think I'm doing a good job, they can replace me with anyone they choose.
I hope you'll join me on this journey!