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Patreon Income Calculator

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Display formatting only. Changing the currency re-labels the same numbers — no exchange rate is applied and nothing is converted.
One charge per patron a month.

Your tiers

One row per membership tier. A patron is charged once a month, so the patron count is also the number of transactions that tier generates.

$0.59 net per patron

$4.15 net per patron

$13.05 net per patron

Fees

Nothing is fetched. Your creator account is never connected and none of these numbers leave your browser — the calculator is arithmetic on what you type, which is also why the fee rates are fields rather than built-in constants.

Check these against your own account
Placeholder values — check your own Patreon plan and payment settings and edit these. They are round example numbers, not published rates, and the real ones differ by plan, country, currency and pledge size.
Taken from gross pledge revenue.
Percentage taken per successful charge.
Flat amount taken per successful charge.
Taken from what survives the fees above.

Some processors charge a different rate on small transactions. If yours does, switch this on and enter the threshold and rate that apply to you — the values below are placeholders, not a published band.

Where the money goes

Gross pledge revenue, drawn to scale as the four things it turns into.

LineAmount a monthShare of gross
Gross pledge revenue$925.00100%

Platform fee

−$74.008.0%

Processing fee

−$104.2511.3%

Payout fee

−$0.000.0%

Net payout

$746.7580.7%

Net payout a month

$746.75

Effective take rate

19.3%

Net per patron

$2.93

Charges a month

255

An independent estimate, not affiliated with or endorsed by Patreon. Your own payout also depends on failed and retried charges, refunds, currency handling, payout thresholds and your local tax rules. Treat this as a planning figure and your creator payments page as the authority.

What each tier contributes

Bars are sized by what the tier adds to your payout, not by how many patrons it holds.

Tier 1 — 150 × $1.00

$88.50 net

Tier 2 — 80 × $5.00

$332.00 net

Tier 3 — 25 × $15.00

$326.25 net

Patrons needed for a target

How many more patrons at a given pledge reach a net monthly income, at the fee rates above.

302 more patrons at $5.00 a month

That takes you to 557 paying patrons and about $2,000.05 net a month. Each of those patrons is worth $4.15 to you after every fee above — churn, failed charges and refunds mean you have to recruit more than you have to keep.

About This Tool

Patreon Income Calculator – What Your Pledges Actually Pay You

The total on your Patreon page and the amount that reaches your bank account are two different numbers, and the distance between them is not one fee but a stack of them applied in sequence. This Patreon income calculator walks that stack in order: gross pledge revenue first, then the platform fee, then the processing fee charged on every single transaction, then anything taken on the way out. The bar at the top of the tool is that chain drawn to scale, so you can see where each unit of currency stops rather than reading one net figure and taking it on trust.

How the fee stack works

The order matters, because each step is applied to what the step before it left behind. For a tier with n patrons pledging p each:

gross = n × p
platform fee = gross × platform%
processing fee = n × (p × processing% + fixed)
net = gross − platform fee − processing fee − payout fee

The platform fee is a percentage of what your patrons pledge — it is the plan you are on, and it scales cleanly with your revenue. The processing fee is charged per successful transaction, and it has two parts: a percentage of the pledge plus a flat amount. The payout fee, where one applies, comes off what survives the first two, typically when money is moved or converted into your own currency. Because every one of those rates depends on your plan, your country, your currency and sometimes the size of the pledge, the calculator asks you for them rather than assuming them. The values it opens with are round placeholders so the example reads clearly; replace them with the figures from your own account.

Why cheap tiers are hit hardest

The flat part of the processing fee is the reason a membership can grow while the payout barely moves. A percentage fee costs the same proportion of every pledge; a flat fee does not. Using the placeholder rates of 8% platform and 3% plus $0.30 per charge, that flat amount alone is 30% of a $1.00 pledge and only 2% of a $15.00 one — before any percentage is taken.

Run those rates over an illustrative membership of 150 patrons at $1.00, 80 at $5.00 and 25 at $15.00. Patrons pledge $925.00 a month; $746.75 arrives, an effective take rate of 19.3%. Inside that, the $1.00 tier nets $0.59 per patron while the $15.00 tier nets $13.05 — not fifteen times as much, but 22.1 times, because the flat fee is charged once per patron regardless of what that patron pledges. The per-tier bars in the tool are drawn by net contribution for exactly this reason: a headcount tells you how popular a tier is, not what it is worth.

Every tier has a floor
At the placeholder rates above, a pledge has to clear roughly $0.34 before it covers the cost of collecting it. A patron pledging $0.17 nets you -$0.15 — they subtract from your payout rather than adding to it, and the calculator flags any tier in that position. Work out your own floor with your own rates before you price a new tier.

Why net is never the pledge total

Three habits of thought inflate a creator’s expectations. The first is reading the pledge sum as income, which ignores the stack entirely. The second is applying one blended percentage to everything — that works for the percentage fees but silently erases the flat per-charge component, and so overstates a cheap-tier membership by the most. The third is treating an annual figure as a forecast: twelve times this month assumes nobody cancels, nobody joins and no rate changes, which is why the annual view in this tool is labelled an estimate rather than a projection.

The goal-seek panel runs the same arithmetic backwards: what one more patron at a given pledge is worth after every fee, divided into the shortfall and rounded up. When a pledge nets nothing after fees the division is refused rather than fudged — no quantity of a tier that costs more to collect than it pays will reach a target.

Getting the rates right

The most reliable way to calibrate this tool is to work backwards from a payout you have already received. Divide what arrived by what your patrons pledged that month, compare it with the effective take rate shown here, and adjust the fee fields until the two agree. At that point the patrons-needed figure becomes something you can plan against.

What this does not cover
Memberships are one income stream, and per-creation charges, merch, shop sales and off-platform income have their own mechanics that are not modelled here. Neither is the last mile of getting paid: failed and retried charges, refunds, currency handling, payout thresholds and your local tax rules. Everything runs in your browser — no account is connected and nothing you type is sent anywhere — and this page is not affiliated with Patreon, nor is it tax advice.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Patreon Income Calculator free?

Yes, Patreon Income Calculator is totally free :)

Can I use the Patreon Income Calculator offline?

Yes, you can install the webapp as PWA.

Is it safe to use Patreon Income Calculator?

Yes, any data related to Patreon Income Calculator only stored in your browser (if storage required). You can simply clear browser cache to clear all the stored data. We do not store any data on server.

How does this Patreon income calculator work?

You enter your tiers — the pledge price and how many patrons are in each — and the fee rates that apply to your own account, and the tool runs them through the deductions in the order they happen. Every patron is treated as one charge a month, so the totals are your pledge revenue, then the platform fee, then the processing fee on each charge, then any payout or currency fee on what is left. The bar at the top is that whole chain drawn to scale, and everything recalculates as you type. It is arithmetic in your browser: no account is connected and nothing you enter is sent anywhere.

Why doesn't the tool already know Patreon's fee rates?

Because there is no single set of them. The plan fee, the payment-processing rate and the payout fee depend on which plan you are on, which country you and your patrons are in, which currency you are paid in and how large the pledge is, and all of them have been revised more than once. A number baked into this page would be wrong for most people and silently out of date for the rest, so every fee here is a field you fill in. The values it starts with are round placeholders to make the example readable — check your own plan and payment settings and type yours over them.

Where do I find the fee rates that apply to me?

Patreon's own pricing page lists the plan fee for each plan, and your creator payments or payouts settings show the processing and payout deductions actually taken from your recent months. The most reliable method is to work backwards from a real payout: divide what arrived by what your patrons pledged that month and compare it with the effective take rate this tool reports. If the two disagree, adjust the fee fields until they match, and you have a model that predicts your next month rather than a generic one.

Why do my cheapest tiers earn so little?

Because part of the processing fee is a flat amount per charge rather than a percentage, and a flat fee is brutal on a small pledge. The same fixed amount that is a rounding error on a $20 pledge can be a third of a $1 pledge before any percentage fee is taken, which is why the tool flags any tier whose per-patron net reaches zero or goes negative. A tier priced below the point where a pledge pays for its own transaction costs you money on every patron in it — the per-tier bars are there so you can see which of your tiers those are.

Does the annual figure account for churn?

No, and it should not be read as a forecast. The annual view is simply this month multiplied by twelve: it assumes nobody cancels, nobody joins, nobody moves tier and no fee rate changes for a full year. Real memberships churn every month, so an annual number built this way is an upper bound on the current roster rather than a prediction. It is useful for comparing scenarios against each other — this tier structure against that one — not for planning a year of income.

How accurate is the patrons-needed estimate?

The arithmetic is exact for the assumptions it states: it works out what one more patron at a given pledge is worth after every fee you entered, and divides the shortfall by that, rounding up because a fraction of a patron does not exist. What it cannot know is churn, failed and retried charges, refunds, or patrons moving between tiers, all of which mean the real number you need to recruit is higher than the number you need to keep. If a patron at that pledge nets zero or less, the tool refuses to divide and says so rather than returning a meaningless figure.