Hi, you lovely people.
If you’re not a Knitty Patron, you likely missed the kerfuffle over Patreon. The short version: Patreon announced they were going to start charging fees to Patrons on top of their pledges. As a result, we lost a lot of Patrons (understandably!) and quite a lot of funding. I was rather distraught (understatement).
So I looked for an alternative way for our Readers to support us, and I found one. And then Patreon said that, due to general outrage, they would not be implementing the new fees after all.
The whole thing made me realize that we had all our funding eggs in one Patreon-shaped basket, and so I went ahead with the plans for a second funding site. Meet knitty.me
Based on feedback from our Patrons, this new site is simple and reward-free. It’s powered by a service called Memberful, and I’m liking it so far. It’s very easy to sign up. The payment engine is powered by Stripe (a credit-card processing service), which powers more online shops than you can imagine. Knitty.me is SSL secured, and Stripe is super secure. So I feel safe using the service, and asking you to use it as well.
The hard truth is that we need the level of funding we were receiving at Patreon to keep publishing. Since all this happened, we’re down about $1500 per issue (and climbing) at Patreon. It would be even more, but a whole bunch of lovely Patrons upped their pledges to help ease the financial damage. Knitty Readers, I’ll say it again, are wonderful people.
So. You want to support us (thank you!) but aren’t sure where to go. Here’s my advice: Either of the services is wonderful. If you like receiving presents, then Patreon is for you. If you don’t care about them, knitty.me is leaner and simpler. However, I can only chat with folks at Patreon for now — the communication is built in.
It’s up to you. If you’d like to support us, now would be the perfect time. Having people pledge to one of the services means we have a steady income we can count on, and we need that. I’ve got to pay people for the Winter issue that we just published. Cause they did great work, as usual.
Really happy to have another option to donate! I’ve been reading Knitty for over ten years now–since I was in high school–and it’s helped me become so much better of a knitter. Now that I’m out in the real world with a real job and a real paycheck I’m very excited to finally sign up as a knitty.me[mber]! Thank you so much for all the beautiful patterns and artists you feature.
I wish the posts were dated, at least month & year.
It’s the list of posts where I can’t find the date. Am I blind?