I hear Wix is very good for that kind of thing.

I think Patreon would be good, it's easy to use and since it's monthly income it'll make it less stressful to pay the bills every month. A bunch of my friends use it and really love it!

Patreon as long as you don't paywall everything like I've seen a lot of artists. It's kinda sad to see people corrupted by the all-mighty dollar, and I'm sure if you gave like sketches and tutorials for the tiers people would help out.

Patreon's worked pretty well for me so far, and it sounds a whole lot more stable than having to make your own website from scratch. And it's much more familiar to most people, so you'll be more likely to have supporters there as well.

My only advice is to not suddenly paywall all of your art like the Great Wall of China. Make sure that there is still good artwork for non-patrons to see. That'll get you more support and slightly less complaining~!

I can help you with this big time. Shoot me a PM.
Real talk though I'm a Canadian who manages a business through Patreon.
I can help work out a great Patreon format for you. Reward Tiers/Goals/Etc...
I've been able to do it several times to successful effect so far.
Patreon also has GREAT tax benefits for a Canadian that most people overlook.
I can show you the world.

You mean by taking people's money and giving nothing substantial in return, hiding all sorts of criticism, banning those who dare say something bad about your.....'game'.....and forging conspiracy theories that people are using Photoshop to make you look like the victim?

Yeah......your way and path is exactly the one Falvie should steer clear of.

"...a Canadian who manages a business through Patreon." - A shitty 'game' which you use to overglorify your character is a business now? Damn!

(Why not both? I know it can be hard to run both, but maybe there's people who would like to just buy art from you and other people that would like to support you with some money and see your art :3 And for the website, you would only need to run the shop, you can personalice it whenever you feel like ^-^)

Patreon
Pros: -It manages itself, easy submission
-You can submit NSFW to it no hassle
-You might actually get people from them looking around the site in itself
-There are people already on it with accounts already set up
-It comes in USD so at this time you get a bit extra
Cons: -has a VAC tax to European countries (this could be like up to 20%)
-user has to have a VISA to sign up for NSFW Patreons
-Bad people who don't pay

Website
Pros: -Customization
-Selling one-off files
Cons: -Lots of work, learning and management on your end
-If you submit NSFW, chances are you won't find anyone good to host you.
-Maybe people won't trust the site

If you're Canadian like me - Patreon counts as donations, therefore not taxed. Patreon can become too much work for people to handle when they have all these ideas and throw out 100 commitment ideas when they struggle to put out a few pics a month anyway. I use it to give people goodies like WIP stuff, videos of the work process, high res files, and you can do a voting thing pretty easy. It's nice to have something giving you donations without obligation. I use Patreon and I'm very happy with the experience, I don't see why I'd ever take down the account when it's like free moneys.

Hopefully this helps a bit, I made some assumptions but pretty much laid out everything I can think of. I STRONGLY do not recommend artists to get an actual website, I do recommend tumblr because it can be customized like a website, you can post nsfw stuff no hassle (again, website hosts don't like nsfw) and it has the extra social functionality. I can see artists enjoying the very professional and official appeal of a real website, but it's just so much work and many artists just struggle making their living without needing to dedicate tons of time to figuring out a website. I imagine the sale of one-off things could still be done on tumblr? Or through a different site's shop I've seen artists use ... It's definitely nice to sell individual files / packs and stuff.

Like the redbubble you use or https://gumroad.com/?
How do you find the redbubble experience? I've seen people use Gumroad and I found it on these sites:
http://ecommerce-platforms.com/ecommerce-selling-advice/top-10-best-ways-sell-digital-goods-online
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/services-sell-digital-products/

I can second the Tumblr aspect as it's a pseudo-website and you can create quick links/pages that you can create displays of your art, what's for sale/available, and it interacts with an existing community. It would be a fair bit clunkier but with a PayPal point of sale/invoices post google form integration with Tumblr you could manage it as a great middle ground between a website outside an existing community and the sales limited Patreon. It... would take a little work finding the right blog style and you'd need to set up a reminder queue for your followers there to keep interest and knowledge that you are selling things on the blog itself as lots of folks to get dashboard tunnel vision.

Correction sorry, I didn't mean to say "user has to have a VISA" specifically - rather, can't use paypal itself to support a nsfw patreon acct.

Anna:

'Bad people who don't pay' was recently solved I beleive? Now a new Patron can'ts ee Patrons only contents till they're pledged for the first time - it prevents the 'set->see->run without paying', also when they're declining a plegde(still Patrons but declining), they can't see the Patron's only posts anymore till they pay, unless I remember it wrong.
So I think this con is no longer valid^^

As someone who has helped my own artist on this decision, it's more a matter of how you can work as a business. While Patreon does have payment issues at times (though that's been highly reduced at this time) there is an issue with PayPal's acceptable use policy and how it's a vague, double-edged sword that Patreon insulates against. Looking through your gallery it'd certainly come up for two reasons:

1) Your content and point of sale is Digital Art and commissions

2) Your content is non-human and has some "questionable" content

I say "questionable" less for the content but more for the non-anthro (animal) pieces and the implied nudity in those cloth-less but covered entirely in fur pieces you have done. This isn't usually an issue with PayPal though having a website requires you have your PayPal semi-public and the risk of your account being reviewed or improperly flagged for bestiality content and thus lose PayPal access and use to your website. It's happened to too many artists in recent years to not consider it a risk of factor to your business' success.

Secondly to these points is that a website is a good front but it's not a really common 'hub' for people to gravitate around. Patreon is as you can browse and discover new artists and content much in a way like we do here on FA. Because of this you're going to limit your market to those you're already exposed to finding your website through various social media sites. Patreon has a built-in mechanic to this that, while flawed and simple, is at least more than a standard website will have unless it's promoted non-stop which can annoy your current fanbase.

Though I may be biased towards Patreon, it's a little simple to start up and be successful in the short and long term as well as it insulates you against PayPal issues (they don't review the payments often), and provides a lot of pre-generated benefits like your tax forms. Lastly, a lot of the talk about people not paying on Patreon was mitigated as any new pledge as of early this year automatically charges the account (so the moment they pledge they are charged their pledge, day one). If by the 5th of the next month, if the account was declined it stands out like a sore thumb and you can remove it much easier than a failed credit card payment through PayPal. They've gotten better at insulating people from abuses for content and it's relatively simple to correct it so long as you don't expose your all content to every tier of payment (i.e. $1 divers for content dumps/rips with false accounts still exist, just keep some payment level variety, nah?).

But really it's all about the model and what you want to charge people for or sell. Not every Patron will want to be charged for new brushes or painting tutorials- most of them would be more into art, exclusive or HD/PSD/SAI versions, etc. So your ideal item to sell compared to your market is likely going to be your biggest starting point, honestly. eJunkie is usually where I see people selling tutorials and brushes/digital art supplies have success though my knowledge and experience with those setups is limited as I fall into the art-content consumer category. If you're going for physical art then you're entering a place where a website would be ideal but the traffic will not be easy to obtain and Patreon would unlikely be a good place to manage that as it's not a marketplace, it's a digital content hub. Physical art sales is certainly far from my forte, sadly, and has a lot of shipping hiccups on PayPal's end having worked with my artist in selling a mere 100 prints last year. Never again. Never again...

Hope this gives you a good set of guidelines. Enjoy~

paypal actually has a monthly billing system. they've had it for a long while where people can setup to autopay you so much every month, so you can implement that in your website

however, there is a way to control what patrons get/don't get if they pay/don't pay/aren't pledged that I do.

Once tiers are paid per month, patreon has an easily selecting system to decide who's paid and who hasn't paid to send them messages. From there you can privately message them a dropbox link to your files/content, and with dropbox you can have the links given to them expire every so many days and even include a password. I personally prefer patreon just because patreon kinda handles everything for you on how much someone has given you during their whole pledge/how much they pay you. IDK if paypal will show you who's paying what how much, but that's just me. Patreon does take a very small fee, but so does paypal, so =]

Woahhh wait, dropbox links can be set to expire? I had no idea -- that's pretty flubbin' awesome. Thanks for pointing that out. :D

Don't underestimate the benefits of a self-sufficient platform like Patreon. Unless you really like doing your own site maintenance, it's much better to let someone else handle it so you can focus on the stuff you do best.

Just as an fyi, you can do recurring transactions in Paypal. You could also use a billing platform that supports recurring billing, or even just charge annually instead. If you decide to go with a website, I can help, just send me a note.

Patreon could be a good idea, but be advised that plenty of other people's Patreons that I've seen failed because it took up way too much of their time.

There's already a ton of good comments here with a ton of good advice, but if you ever need help with building a site, I know a little bit about web design myself and I could help out! Just shoot me a message if you'd like. If not, that's totally fine :) All the advice here is great already lol

Patreon has been a great help for me personally over the last little while since launching it. It's a little extra money each month that's allowed me to work on more of my own ideas instead of relying solely on commissions, which is nice cause commissions can wear on an artist over time. <.> We're small time and doing really great so far and it's always growing the more we put out, so I'd say you would do really well for sure! It's really easy to set up and costs nothing, where as a website would maybe cost ya a little bit to create and manage. There are problems with bots doing fake auto pledging, but it's minimal and they've created a new system where only the real pledgers totals are tallied and shown to you so you can more accurately figure out your monthly earnings. I live in Canada as well, and when I signed up they had the tax forms ready to be signed online, there is an area there that is a little confusing where it asks you for your foreign tax number, but I asked the folks at Patreon about that and they said to just use my Social Insurance Number, I should say currently our Patreon is managed by a member of our team who lives in the states, so I haven't actually signed those forms for it just yet, but yesh, they assured me that my SIN # would work, but their are plenty of peeps on there from Canada that I'm sure could help ya out with that stuff if ya asked em. ^^ Anyway, hope some of this info helps ya out, good luck Falvie! :)

I'll max out the top patreon tier if you do one...you're one of my favourite artists.

But yeh, you could easily make a patreon with $2 tip tiers, $10 WIP sketches, etc all the way to maybe a $250 tier and that would cover your $500/mo. cost.

I'd say website simply because apparently literally everyone has a patreon and that might stand out a bit more and feel more special..

I have paypal subscription system set up on my website and it's been a better choice than patreon was for me. I have less subscribers but more income. Both because people are more comfortable sending me bigger amounts directly with paypal and because there are no extra fees other than paypal's transfers c:

It's also possible to setup an automatic account&passwords with paypals subscriptions so subscribers get exclusive content. But you'll need someone who can modify a perl script for that (paypal gives you a template to download but it's not complete or ready to use as is). I used that at first but dropped it later since I'm bad with exclusive content and want to show everyone everything, but it worked fine when it did! ^^;

I'd opt for Patreon. First off all, patreon is a free platform for everyone. so there's no costs for setting one up. You'd get a frequent amount of money that's vast, instead of depending on sales and visits on a website.

If you'd go for a website, you will either need a free platform that allows you to create one (like Wix for example) but then the URL of the website would be www.somethingyouwant.wix.com, which looks incredibly unprofessional from my point of view. So the other option for a website would be to have someone create it for you. I am studying Web Development myself, and unless you have close friend or someone who wants to do it for a small amount of money, it would cost a lot of money to set up. So yeah.... I think Patreon is the way to go

In my opinion, Patreon is hands down the best option. However, if you're outside the US, I highly reccomend you to use Payoneer in stead of Paypal. Paypal charges a small commission for every single payment a patron makes, which means that your incoming will always be way lower than you expect. I just wish I had known about this before. It's true that Patreon charges a commission, but it's a 5% and it think it's worth it, because you have all the tools you need to manage your patrons' payments. I have a patreon account and i think the worst part is paypal and its commissions, but in general I'm very happy with it.

Definitely website for you, Falvie. Since you have a pretty big traffic and your art isn't stable from month to month Patreon can get you in trouble and it WILL put a lot pressure on you, trust me! I see people suggesting Patreon for you, which I really think is a bad idea. :|

I think both would be great. Why is Patreon a bad idea? I've seen artists run their Patreons as tip jars only, which takes the pressure off of the artist, and allows those who simply want to help support the artist, to do so.

Check out inkedfur too. I've been pleased with them.

Patreon would be good for a more self-guided approach, I think. Coding the distribution of product can be a nightmare, so if you wanted to go the website route, I'd suggest something like Gumroad.

I don't know what your work schedule looks like, but having a Patreon is more appealing to me (personally) because I have a set release schedule that keeps me in line. So i'd consider distribution methods and what would motivate you to post more.

Patreon kinda messed me up. It takes 10%, which it didn't tell me, you can only access the money at the beginning of each month, and if someone wants to just give you money ONCE, it is a huge hassle

If you needed a website and have an idea for it: i could always help you out we could work something out (Webcoding is my diploma standards): http://theteawolf.org/
even if its something for the short time. With websites you can do anything and always incorporate more as time goes.

My vote is for Patreon. You could possibly offer extras and non-furry related tutorials and things as well on your website.

Patreon charges people in Europe an extra ~20% as tax, which the artist doesn't receive. About 10% getting lost in transit (Paypal and Patreon fees) before reaching the artist is acceptable, but losing about 25% (that extra tax charge) is too inefficient.

Both, absolutely! Patreon can be used as a tip jar only, so you don't have to worry about giving out anything and then having people take their funds back before the payments go out.

No idea how exorbitant the VAT is with patreon, but I'm assuming it's higher for all non-US users. Setting up your own subscription method will almost always be the ideal one, it just requires more effort to maintain. With patreon you're just losing money for the sake of convenience. Patreon paying a "regular budget" is pretty much the same deal, better financial management (and honing self-restraint) is a good skill to work on; setting up safeguards and preventative measures is like saying "I don't trust myself" and that's no good!

I'm pretty sure you can set up a monthly subscription method for PayPal, either make a little button to embed on a website or provide written instructions.

If you're ambivalent to the point of inaction, then just do both and drop whichever one turns out to be inferior; notify those subscribers and direct them to the primary subscription method prior to terminating the secondary one. Either method is better than nothing though, and this is something you probably should've done some time ago, but it's good you're getting on to it now. :3

You could get away with doing a simple kickstarter to help set up a workstation and a really nice (reliable, non-half-assed) website with a database for storing user account info, while also providing a financial buffer in the meantime. If you do that, put shirts, commissions, early access (have VIP subscribers who receive 1-2 week early access?)and 1 month free subscription to the content on the site (once it's established) as rewards. It'll work, up to you though~

You'll possibly need a business PayPal instead of a personal one? Might depend on how much you're receiving, but definitely look into that if you haven't already.



My advice is:
- Take a detailed look into PayPal User Agreement, and whether you need personal/business account.
- Find out how to set up PayPal subscription method to accept recurring payments from clients.
- Open kickstarter campaign.
- Advertise kickstarter campaign on all art sites you frequent
- Open temporary patreon account, and have a play around with that while the website is being established (can transfer tier rewards and whatev to the website later to make things easier).
- Find a professional web designer (who can set up everything including database, you can provide them with art/icons)
- Show web designer your patreon, so they have a good idea of what your site will be used for.

- As a general rule, keep $500 in your primary bank account, $200 in paypal (for spending/refunds), and put everything else into a savings account - don't take any money out of there unless it's above $10,000

If you can, both. Otherwise, website. In most scenarios, Patreon is better, but you have enough "fandom" to go for an website. I highly recommend www.anubianhost.com, as the CEO is a furry  Sinabu and the prices are amazing. If you look for a while you can even find a discount! ;3
In case you do choose him, would you mind please use the referal system for me? You can send me a note for further details. ;3

Is this regaurding that tutorial you said your were gonna update on your old drawing of renamon? and also give the brushes you used? I thought that one was suppose to be free? Or did i read wrong that time ago?

And also i think you should go with your own website.