Transitioning from patreon to ghost

Memberships & subscriptions Tiers
1

Hey, seeking advice from those who have transitioned their patreon audience over to ghost. How did you implement the change? Keep your subscription base? And in what time-frame?
Thanks

2

Hey @LightResonance

You may have figured this out already, but Patreon doesn’t have portable payment data, which means there’s no way to migrate customer data from Patreon to Ghost - or any other platform. This means your supporters will need to re-subscribe on your Ghost site using their credit card.

So with that in mind, what you’ll need to think about is how you can carefully transition your paid audience. For example, you could:

  • Unpublish your Tiers on Patreon - this allows you to keep publishing content on Patreon. (I think you might need to keep one Tier active, but you could make it a high ticket price and make it clear that you’re in the process of moving for any new visitors - the purpose of this is to prevent new signups on Patreon).
  • Create an Offer in Ghost to share with existing Patrons, incentivizing them to make the switch, and create a plan and a timeline for how you will communicate this change with your audience effectively.
  • In terms of publishing content, you could publish new stuff on both Ghost and Patreon to start with, and gradually start to move towards Ghost. Alternatively, you could post new content on Ghost only, and create a new post in Patreon each time with links to that post and instructions on how (and why) supporters should consider switching.

Ultimately, this is as much of a business decision as it is a technical one. There is of course some risk of churn that you need to be prepared for - but the benefit is that once you’ve switched, you’ll have a custom publication, and retain all of your revenue as Ghost doesn’t take a percentage.

I’m not sure if there are any members of this community who have already done this and might be able to chime in here? Let us know your thoughts!

P.S we also have a resource about this topic that you might be interested in. It’s going to be updated very soon to include more information about the process I just shared above.

3 Likes
3

Hey Kym, thanks so much for your detailed reply. It’s really helpful!

4

Glad it was helpful :) Let us know how you get along if you decide to transition your audience to Ghost.