I'm surprised it's only 10%. Just dealing with credit card fees is going to cost them ~2%, and probably more since they take so many tiny donations. Then they have to deal with chargebacks, customer support (both for patrons and creators), and the overhead of building out the business.
A nonprofit isn't all it's cracked up to be. It must means that it doesn't have shareholders who own the company. It can still pay employees, sometimes very well. It gets tax benefits in exchange for limiting the kind of business it does to something for the public good, but Patreon doesn't really fit those existing categories very well. It looks more like a payment processor, the kind of service you hire like a web page developer or carpenter.
I suppose there's room for somebody to try to squeeze them out by charging even less, perhaps by dogfooding their own service. But if they're charging only ten cents on the dollar, there's not an enormous amount of room for competition, and you'd need to start by raising a ton of money from people purely for charity.
A nonprofit isn't all it's cracked up to be. It must means that it doesn't have shareholders who own the company. It can still pay employees, sometimes very well. It gets tax benefits in exchange for limiting the kind of business it does to something for the public good, but Patreon doesn't really fit those existing categories very well. It looks more like a payment processor, the kind of service you hire like a web page developer or carpenter.
I suppose there's room for somebody to try to squeeze them out by charging even less, perhaps by dogfooding their own service. But if they're charging only ten cents on the dollar, there's not an enormous amount of room for competition, and you'd need to start by raising a ton of money from people purely for charity.