I make my living off Patreon and have many people doing exactly that. Also, I support quite a few Patreons myself but they're all ones that I can do $1 a month… forever.
I feel like if I started throwing around $5 pledges, I'd soon have to backtrack, and that seems bad. But then being close to the top 50 in the Music category equates to maybe a bit over minimum wage so I do in fact have to budget if I intend to keep all my pledges up forever. So I do budget.
Any way people want to do this is fine with me. I prefer the little tiny patreon pledges, because they average out to a steady amount. The danger of pushing people to do larger pledges (even the $5) is that they will hit a rough patch and bail. If you have encouraged them to pledge only small amounts they think they can afford, and encouraged them NOT to pledge if they can't handle it, people see it more as a 'stick with it' thing rather than a 'highest amount' thing. And 'stick with it' is more predictable and easier to plan for, as the creator.
I thought Brave was going to go a different direction, closer to what Apple music streaming does, where they look at your traffic over the month and divvy up your subscription between them.
Or even: these are all of the things you support: which ones did you enjoy this month?
I feel like if I started throwing around $5 pledges, I'd soon have to backtrack, and that seems bad. But then being close to the top 50 in the Music category equates to maybe a bit over minimum wage so I do in fact have to budget if I intend to keep all my pledges up forever. So I do budget.
Any way people want to do this is fine with me. I prefer the little tiny patreon pledges, because they average out to a steady amount. The danger of pushing people to do larger pledges (even the $5) is that they will hit a rough patch and bail. If you have encouraged them to pledge only small amounts they think they can afford, and encouraged them NOT to pledge if they can't handle it, people see it more as a 'stick with it' thing rather than a 'highest amount' thing. And 'stick with it' is more predictable and easier to plan for, as the creator.