Patreon is a membership platform that lets creators charge recurring subscriptions directly to their audience, founded in May 2013 by musician Jack Conte and engineer Sam Yam. Creators publish tiers with attached benefits — early access, private posts, community, physical goods — and the platform handles billing, member management, and delivery in exchange for a percentage of the take.

Conte built the first version after a music video that took months to produce returned only a few dollars in advertising revenue; the premise was to replace sponsorship and brand deals with direct patronage, monetizing a small committed audience rather than a large indifferent one. Creators have been paid more than $10 billion cumulatively as of 2025, across roughly 25 million paid memberships. The company's valuation tracked the creator-economy cycle closely — $4 billion at an April 2021 raise, marked down sharply in the years that followed — while competitive pressure arrived from platforms bolting on native subscriptions and from app-store fees taxing mobile payments. Patreon has answered by extending past pure membership into commerce and its own video and community surfaces.