Nowadays, hundreds of crowdfunding sites exist to assist people in raising funds for various purposes, ranging from charity to art to real estate.
GoFundMe and Patreon are two excellent online crowdfunding sites that allow you to raise money, but they serve distinct objectives and appeal to different audiences.
Key Takeaways
- Patreon supports ongoing, subscription-based funding for creators, whereas GoFundMe focuses on one-time fundraising for specific causes or projects.
- Patreon caters to various artists and content creators, while GoFundMe serves various personal, business, and charitable causes.
- Patreon provides creators a platform to build a community, offering rewards and exclusive content to supporters. At the same time, GoFundMe emphasizes the simplicity of raising funds for a cause without additional engagement features.
Patreon vs GoFundMe
Patreon is a membership-based platform that allows creators, such as artists, writers, and musicians, to receive ongoing financial support from their fans or patrons. GoFundMe is a crowdfunding platform that helps individuals and organizations to raise funds for a specific cause or project. These causes can range from personal emergencies, medical bills, education costs.
Patreon is an American firm whose business is to supply online content creation tools to artists for them to run a subscription plan.
The technologies are used mainly by YouTube creators, webcomic creators, singers, artists, podcasters, adult content creators, and others. On May 2, 2013, Jack Conte and Sam Yam launched the firm.
GoFundMe is a for-profit crowdfunding website based in the United States that allows individuals to collect funds for a variety of events ranging from life milestones
such as weddings and graduations to challenging circumstances such as accidents and diseases.
From 2010 until the beginning of 2020, the website generated about $10 billion in contributions from nearly 125 million participants.
Comparison Table
| Parameters of Comparison | Patreon | GoFundMe |
|---|---|---|
| What is it? | It is a creative and content-based platform to assist creators in earning a sustainable income. | 5 to 12 % plus payment processing costs of roughly 3 per cent |
| Fees and Pricing for Creators | 0-5 per cent (depending on region) plus about 3% payment processing fees | 0-5 percent (depending on region) plus about 3% payment processing fees |
| Cash-out Method for creators | Stripe, PayPal, and Payoneer | Payment to creators is immediate and direct. |
| Integration | It can be easily connected with Discord, WordPress, and other famous applications. | Your fundraising campaigns may be incorporated using a GoFundMe-styled widget. |
| Intended for | For content providers that provide subscription plans, create recurrent content, and require value integration. | For creators who want to raise finances, launch a one-time campaign, or pursue a personal goal. |
What is Patreon?
Patreon is a crowdsourcing website in San Francisco founded in 2013. Since its inception, the site has assisted 52,639 creators in raising over $100 million.
On the platform, 867,473 patrons contribute to campaigns.
Artists and creators use Patreon to allow people to finance their work on a monthly or per-project basis.
Patrons receive advantages such as content subscriptions, exclusive privileges, live streaming, and more in return for monthly payments.
Creators on this platform may establish several financing milestones and explain to their backers what each will allow them to achieve.
One of the fantastic things about Patreon is that it allows artists and producers to collect funds without giving up any of their content rights; they keep complete control of anything they make and share with their audience.
Patreon allows producers to create several membership tiers. The author decides on each level’s number of stories and the subscription fee.
Casual fans might be willing to pay a modest monthly fee – potentially as little as $1 – while more devoted fans might pay as much as $10 or $20 monthly.
Donors at top levels gain access to exclusive and unique material that sponsors at bottom levels do not.
Tiers are flexible as well as customizable. Several creators may opt for only one level to reduce the operational strain of coping with incentives and correspondence.
Others organize their tiers with a supporter cap to prevent becoming overburdened with the creation, packaging, and distribution of premium content.
What is GoFundMe?
GoFundMe is a popular donation-based crowdfunding tool that debuted in 2010. GoFundMe has helped creators on its platform raise over $3 billion in the previous seven years.
This crowdfunding tool is most commonly used for emergencies, although users may raise funds for almost anything. They are the world’s largest social fundraising platform, with a network of over 25 million donors.
The setup process for folks who want to start a GoFundMe campaign is straightforward and quick. Furthermore, after establishing your page, you may quickly change its details.
Compared to other donation-based crowdfunding systems, GoFundMe allows you to add prizes. Offline donations can also be added to your online donation total.
In this approach, GoFundMe allows users to raise donations in various ways while keeping 100% of the dollars raised, even when they cannot achieve their aim.
There are also no tight deadlines to meet. If there is a need, campaigns might last continuously, such as those for continuing medical bills.
Users can fundraise for various causes, including medical, volunteer, emergency, education, memorial, sports, animals, desires, contests, sports, newlyweds, charity, faith, travel, creative, community, events, businesses, and families.
Furthermore, it claims to be the figurehead in digital healthcare fundraising.
One in every three initiatives aims to generate cash for medical expenses, with over 250,000 campaigns raising $650 million in contributions each year.
This is due, in part, to inadequacies in the United States healthcare system, with GoFundMe being utilized to fill the void.
Main Differences Between Patreon and GoFundMe
- Patreon is a San Francisco-based crowdsourcing service that was created in 2013. GoFundMe, which began in 2010, is a popular donation-based crowdfunding site.
- Patreon is intended for regular content providers who want to monetize their work, whereas GoFundMe is designed for specific fundraising initiatives.
- Patreon accepts subscription-based payments, whereas GoFundMe only accepts one-time donations.
- While Patreon takes a 5% – 12% cut of the authors’ revenue, GoFundMe takes a similar 5% cut. While most artists’ ultimate objective is to make a profit, GoFundMe wins because of its reduced commission on your revenue.
- Patreon integrates seamlessly with sites such as Discord, WordPress, and Zapier, allowing authors to expand Patreon membership to their sites. GoFundMe, on the other hand, works with various websites and applications by adding a button code or link.
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02732173.2021.1875090
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02732173.2018.1502105
Last Updated : 13 July, 2023
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Chara Yadav holds MBA in Finance. Her goal is to simplify finance-related topics. She has worked in finance for about 25 years. She has held multiple finance and banking classes for business schools and communities. Read more at her bio page.
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