Supporter Pricing
I want to help independent creators make money from what they create, let me walk you through an idea. It applies to any indie product: games, tools, movies, books, comics, podcasts, etc.
You’re an indie creator. You’ve poured your passion into a game, a tool, a comic. You want to share it with the world and you’d love to make back some of your investment, ideally enough to do this full-time. Today you have two routes:
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Charge for it. The problem is that people can tell it’s indie. It hasn’t gone viral, it only has a few customers, and it’s unproven. Why pay for it? If you go the donation route instead, the market is small. Most who ask for donations don’t make much, if anything.
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Get a publisher. The publisher pays you up front in exchange for a share of profits. Since publishers can’t pick winners reliably, they manage their risk by spreading bets across many projects. Invest in a lot, hope one hits big and pays for the rest.
The publisher system works if you can get a publisher who will take your app. For the rest of us, let’s imagine a third route that I’m calling “Supporter Pricing”. It kind of crowd sources the publisher model: when you buy an indie product, you get a share of the profits if it is successful. The successes help pay you back for the ones that didn’t work out. Either way you get the software, but the model helps take the resistence out of paying. It changes buying an indie product from being a donation into funding an ecosystem where customers share in the upside.
Getting a share has other benefits too: You’re not a patron anymore, you’re an investor. You have a stake and a reason to help the product grow: tell friends, write reviews, spread the word. That grows the customer base, which is exactly what the creator (and now the customer) needs.
How It Works
Credit card refunds and payout platforms enable this. Pricing is similar so let’s use credit card refunds as an example. When you buy something with a card, the seller can refund part or all of the charge back to you. This already exists and buyers trust it. There are lots of ways to use this refund tool, here’s one approach:
- Publish the $ target you want to recoup (say $50,000, but it could be 0$ to start sharing immediately)
- Picks a refund schedule (say 8 weeks after the target, then quarterly)
- Set a refund share which is the % of surplus that goes back to buyers (say 50%)
- Set a price (say $25)
People buy your product like normal. At each refund point, you take all the surplus revenue since the last one, multiply by the refund share (50%), and divide that evenly among every buyer at that point. Everyone who has bought the product gets the same refund, whether they bought on day one or last week.
There are many different dials on the approach you could take, but let’s work through the above example first: Target is $50,000. Price is $25. Refund share is 50%. Schedule is 8 weeks after target, then quarterly.
From the developer’s perspective:
- Let’s say after 2,000 sales we hit the target of $50,000, revenue beyond that is shared.
- 8 weeks after target 1,000 more sales have come in, totalling $25,000. Since these are shared at 50%, the refund pool is $12,500. There are now 3,000 total buyers and thus each gets a $4.17 refund.
- One quarter later is the second refund: let’s say 2,000 more sales = $50,000 surplus. 50% of that is a $25,000 pool. Now there are 5,000 total buyers across all time and each gets $5.00.
- Third refund (next quarter): 500 sales, $12,500 surplus. 50% = $6,250 pool. 5,500 buyers. Each gets $1.14.
From the buyer’s perspective:
- A buyer who was there from the start got $4.17 + $5.00 + $1.14 = $10.31 back on their $25.
- A buyer who showed up right before the second refund got $5.00 + $1.14 = $6.14 back.
- A buyer who bought after the third refund gets nothing yet, but they’re in the pool for next time.
What It Costs
Using the example above:
| Gross Revenue | 5,500 sales at $25 | $137,500 |
| Refunds | Rounds 1-3 combined | ($43,750) |
| Stripe Sales Fees | ~$1.03 per sale x 5,500 | ($5,665) |
| Stripe Refund Fees | ~$0.25 per refund x 13,500 | ($3,375) |
| Net Revenue | $84,710 |
The fees are 10.7% of what they kept, compared to 4.3% without supporter pricing. That’s about 6 extra percentage points, entirely from the per-refund fee adding up across thousands of buyers.
How You’d Actually Do It
Different ways of selling are best served by different approaches:
Your own website (Stripe, PayPal, etc.) is the easiest case. You control the payment flow. You can issue partial refunds via the Stripe API or use Stripe Connect / PayPal mass payouts to send money to buyers directly. You track the ledger and pick the schedule and run the math.
Steam is harder. Valve handles all payments and takes 30%. You can’t programmatically issue a partial refund on a base game sale (only on microtransactions via the Steamworks API). So you’d need to collect buyer contact info separately (an email at signup, a linked account) and do payouts outside of Steam. The 30% cut changes the math significantly: Stripe takes ~4%, Steam takes 30%.
The App Store is the hardest. Apple takes 30% (or 15% if you earn under $1M/year) and does not let developers initiate refunds. Apple recently added APIs that let developers participate in refund decisions, but you can’t send a partial refund to a customer yourself. Like Steam, you’d need to collect buyer info through your app and do payouts through PayPal, Stripe Connect, or similar. One bright spot: a May 2025 US court ruling now lets iOS apps link to external payment with 0% Apple commission, which could change the picture entirely for US customers. No App Store guideline explicitly prohibits paying money back to users, but Apple’s guidelines don’t clearly address it either, so there’s some risk of rejection during app review.
Variations
There are lots of ways to change the approach. Some examples:
- “Might Be Eventually Free”: Once you’re refunded the entire purchase price you’re out of the pool.
- “Guaranteed Pricing”: Price drops at milestones ($45 at launch, $30 after $10k in sales, $20 after $25k, etc.) and earlier buyers get refunded the difference each time.
- “Pay It Forward”: tiers keep dropping until every buyer has been refunded down to a floor price (say $5). Once that happens, the software is free forever.
- Cap refunds at 2x or 3x the target and then stop: The earlier you bought the more you make. Earlier buyers took more risk and get rewarded if it takes off.
- Set the target to $0: start sharing surplus from the very first sale. The creator makes money purely from their share of revenue.