Full disclosure before we start. I work on Crownerr, which is a place creators can move their memberships to. That gives me a bias, and it also means I have spent a lot of time watching people leave Patreon and seeing exactly where it goes wrong. This guide is the version I wish more creators had before they pulled the trigger.
The hard truth first. You cannot port a live Patreon subscription anywhere. Card details are held by Patreon's payment processor, and they do not hand them over. So every patron has to actively re-subscribe on the new thing. That single fact decides almost everything about how you should run the move.
What actually breaks when you leave
Three things break, and they break in different ways.
Patrons have to re-pledge from scratch
This is the big one. A patron who has been paying you £5 a month for two years without thinking about it now has to make a fresh decision, enter a card, and confirm. Some won't. Not because they stopped liking you, but because the moment of friction is enough to make them shrug and move on. Most of the churn people talk about on migrations is this: the gap between people who meant to follow you and people who got around to it.
You cannot remove that step. You can only make it short, obvious, and worth doing.
iOS patrons are a separate, worse problem
If a chunk of your patrons signed up through the Patreon iOS app, their payment runs through Apple. Apple takes its cut and, more importantly, you often do not get a usable email or any way to reach those people directly off-platform. When you leave, those patrons can be close to invisible to you. Before you announce anything, export your patron data and look hard at how many supporters you actually have a real email address for. That number, not your total patron count, is your migratable audience. The Apple tax piece covers why iOS sign-ups behave this way.
Your back catalogue does not follow you
Posts, tiers, and the little community that built up in comments stay on Patreon. You can re-upload content, but the history and the context do not transfer. Plan to rebuild the shape of it rather than copy it byte for byte.
The order of operations that keeps churn down
The creators who lose the fewest people treat the move like a campaign, not a switch.
- Set up the new home fully before you say a word. Tiers priced, a few posts live, the welcome flow working. A half-built destination converts badly.
- Export everything you can from Patreon. Emails, tier membership, pledge amounts, join dates. This is your outreach list.
- Email your patrons directly, more than once. Not a single announcement post that the algorithm buries. A real email, then a reminder a week later, then a last call before you wind down the old page.
- Give people a concrete reason to re-subscribe now. A founding-member price, a piece of content that only exists on the new home, a discount for the first month. The job is to make moving feel like a small upgrade, not a chore.
- Run both in parallel for a while. Do not delete Patreon the day you launch. Let the two overlap for a month or two so stragglers have time.
Where the money goes after the move
One reason people leave Patreon is the fee. Patreon's cut sits somewhere around 8 to 12 percent depending on your plan, before payment processing. Part of choosing a new home is just looking at what you keep, and the platform fees explainer breaks down how those layers stack.
On Crownerr the platform fee runs 5 percent on the free plan, 2 percent on Creator, and 0 percent on Studio, and your memberships live inside a Space you own on your own domain rather than on a page that rents you the audience. You can compare the fee ladder on the pricing page, and there is an honest side-by-side on the Crownerr vs Patreon page that says plainly where Patreon is still the better tool. Patreon's community UX and its discovery are genuinely strong, and pretending otherwise would not help you.
If you are still weighing options rather than committed to one, the alternatives overview and the how it works walkthrough are the calmer places to start.
The migration is not a data transfer. It is a re-ask. Build the new home so the re-ask is easy, then go ask, in person, by email, twice.
A realistic expectation
You will lose some patrons. Anyone who tells you that you can move with zero churn is selling something. A well-run move tends to keep most of your engaged supporters and quietly shed the ones who were already drifting. That second group was going to lapse anyway. The goal is to protect the people who actually care, give them a frictionless path, and not let Apple-locked or unreachable patrons surprise you on the way out.