Placeholder copy — the real migration write-up goes here.
Patreon was never meant to be a billing system for software. It was the thing that was already there when the first person offered to pay, and then it was the thing everybody was already on.
Why move at all
The short version: tax handling, invoices people can actually give to their accountant, and being able to change a price without writing a paragraph explaining it.
- Invoices with real VAT handling
- Plans that map to what the app actually does
- Webhooks I can trust enough to grant access from
- One dashboard instead of three
The migration itself was two weekends. Deciding to do it took eleven months.
The part that went wrong
Nothing broke that a refund could not fix, but a batch of renewals ran twice for about forty minutes. If you got two emails that day: that was me, and the second charge came straight back.
What I would tell past me
Write the reconciliation script before the migration, not after. Keep both systems readable for a full billing cycle. And send the announcement email earlier than feels comfortable.