It's not every day my worlds collide like this, so I'll plug https://freesewing.org/ for those of you who have an interest in making clothes and are looking for a place to start that is a good match for the hackernews crowd.
We don't use patreon. Patrons can subscribe directly through PayPal.
We don't need the Patreon approach because everything on the site is available for free. Being a patron is completely optional.
It boils down to the fact that all are patterns are made-to-measure. So we need your measurements, thus we need a way to store them. That's why a (free) account is needed.
Full disclosure: I'm the freesewing maintainer