We’ve reduced some of your crowdfunding pledges

3 minute read

One of the great things about Patreon as a crowdfunding platform is that you can adjust the sums associated with your various membership tiers. All the info on that site seems to assume you will only ever be increasing these so that you can make more money. We have decided to reduce one of ours. This is how we do business.

As a very quick recap, we launched our Patreon campaign in 2019 in the hope that we might be able to spend a bit more time working on the site. That happened. Longer feature articles ensued.

More recently, we decided we would rely on crowdfunding entirely and removed all of the ads from the site. (This arrangement is theoretically supposed to last until April 2025, but between you and us, we can’t be arsed switching them on again so they’re probably gone for good.)

Unlike most Patreon campaigns, pledging to King Cricket doesn’t immediately obviously get you anything. All the content on King Cricket is entirely free whether you pay a monthly sum or not. The way it works is that the more people pledge, the more we’re able to do, meaning everyone (who likes the website) benefits.

Pledges are voluntary contributions to the common good. And we’ve just reduced a bunch of them. Sorry about that, non-pledging beneficiaries of others’ largesse.

What’s changed?

We previously had an ‘Honorific’ tier where £10 monthly pledges bought you the right to call yourself Sir or Dame in the comments section.

There were two problems with this:

1. No-one wanted to call themselves Sir or Dame, so it was kind of a nonsense
2. £10 is honestly just a bit too much – it makes us a bit uncomfortable

So we’ve replaced the ‘Honorific’ tier with one called ‘A pint at a Test match‘. This costs £8.70, which is apparently what they were selling some beers for at The Oval last year (including a £1 ‘deposit’ for the glass).

This new ‘A pint at a Test match’ tier complements the ongoing £2.70 tier which has always been based on the price of a pint in our local in about 2010. We’ve renamed that one ‘An historic pint‘.

You can also pledge £1 a month via the ‘Shiny coin‘ tier (even if you aren’t old enough to remember the days of £1 a pint).

It’s also worth stating that you can also choose to pledge any other sum, as long as it’s more than a quid. If yours is the price of a thing at a certain point in time, you can tell us that when you pledge.

What does this mean?

Those of you who signed up to the ‘Honorific’ tier will probably find that you’re paying less from next month. (We’re pretty sure this’ll happen. Like we say, the Patreon info’s not really worded for reducing pledges, so it’s hard to be certain.)

That said, a word of warning: our plan is to update the ‘A pint at a Test match’ pricing each summer, according to the sums that materialise out there in the wild. Prices seem to go up at least 10% each year as a matter of course, so you could well find you’re paying more than £10 by 2026. (Or more likely we’ll baulk at the £10 barrier and take the glass deposit off, or downgrade it to Old Trafford pricing or something.)

If you want to change anything pledge-wise, here’s another link to our Patreon page.