Everyone else buries this, so we will lead with it: Patreon does not let you export your patrons' contact details, and its policy explicitly forbids you from asking for them. Every guide telling you to "just email your patrons" is telling you to break a published rule that can get your page removed. The real migration is slow, public and legitimate. Here it is.
Last updated July 2026
We promote, price and message for creators making the jump, so the new page earns before the old one goes quiet. Free application, a reply within 24 hours, and your login and payouts stay yours.
You migrate from Patreon in public, over months, not in a weekend. Patreon will not hand you your patrons' email addresses and its off-Patreon activity policy prohibits you from requesting them, so the audience has to be moved through channels you actually own: your social accounts, your link-in-bio, and a new offer worth switching for. Run both platforms in parallel for at least a billing cycle or two, and when you finally step back from Patreon, pause the page rather than unpublishing it.
Still deciding whether to go at all? Start with why creators are leaving Patreon and what Patreon's NSFW rules actually permit.
Both sides of the policy, quoted. Read the second half carefully, because that is the whole playbook.
| Status | What Patreon says |
|---|---|
| Forbidden | Requesting personal contact information from Patreon users, including email addresses, phone numbers, or direct messaging usernames |
| Forbidden | Sharing links to private, closed, or password-protected messenger apps or chat threads |
| Forbidden | Using Patreon as a lead generation platform for external services |
| Forbidden | Payment system circumvention including any attempt to bypass Patreon's payment tools to avoid fees or taxes |
| Permitted | Links to your public social pages, including Instagram, TikTok and Facebook |
| Permitted | For 18+ creators, hosting content off-platform. Patreon names the permitted sites: Vimeo, YouTube, OnlyFans, and podcasting sites or aggregators |
Read the bottom row again, because it is genuinely remarkable. Patreon's guidance for 18+ creators reads: "18+ creators cannot use Patreon Native Video, but they can link to external platforms to host their content. Permitted sites include: Vimeo, YouTube, OnlyFans, Podcasting sites/aggregators." Patreon names OnlyFans on its own permitted list. That is your bridge, in writing, from the platform you are leaving.
The line is clear once you see it. You may point your audience at a public profile. You may not harvest contact details, push people into a private Discord or Telegram thread, use Patreon as a lead generation platform, or route payments around its payment tools. Everything below stays on the right side of that line.
The dramatic exit is the most expensive thing you can do here, and almost nobody warns creators about it. Patreon publishes the rule itself: "If you unpublish your page or if Patreon unpublishes your page for any reason, you'll be subject to Patreon's new, standard 10% plan." It then advises, in its own words, "Use the pause tool instead of unpublishing your creator page."
Read that again if you are on a legacy plan. The old 5%, 8% and 11% tiers closed to new pages on August 4, 2025. Unpublish as your closing gesture and a grandfathered 5% or 8% rate is gone forever. Come back in six months because the new platform did not work out, and you come back at 10%. There is no appeal. It is not a punishment, it is just the policy.
So: pause, do not unpublish. A paused page costs nothing and preserves an option you cannot buy back. Migration is a business decision, not a breakup. Our breakdown of how much Patreon takes shows what a legacy rate is worth to you.
Eight steps, all of them inside the rules, none of them fast.
Unpublish and you land on the standard 10% plan permanently. Use the pause tool, and keep the page earning while you build the new one.
Migration is an overlap, not a switch. Never cut an income line before you have replaced it. A billing cycle or two of running both is cheap insurance.
Your X, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and link-in-bio belong to you. Your patron list and Patreon DMs do not. Whatever carries the audience across must live on a channel you control.
A tier ladder built for monthly pledges does not translate to a platform where income comes from pay-per-view, tips and messages. Price for the new mechanics.
Nobody re-enters card details out of loyalty. Move for something new: a format Patreon forbids, a launch window, content that exists nowhere else.
You will lose a meaningful share of patrons. Budget as though the number is ugly, because assuming it is small and being wrong is a problem by week three.
ID verification, plus written consent documentation for anyone else appearing in your content. A Visa and Mastercard requirement, not a platform quirk, and Patreon enforces it too.
A public exit rant moves no patrons and can invite a review of the page you still depend on. Leave quietly, keep the door open.
Your patron list is not an asset you own. It is an audience Patreon rents to you, and the agreement says you may not take their contact details with you. Fighting that costs you the page. Accepting it changes the plan: every ounce of effort goes into the channels that are actually yours.
Your Patreon page links to your public social profiles, which Patreon explicitly permits. Your public profiles link to the new platform. That chain is legitimate and it is the only one that scales, so post on X, Instagram, TikTok and Reddit with the energy you reserve for patron-only updates, and update the link-in-bio that carries all of it the day the new page launches. The implication is uncomfortable: no public audience means nothing to migrate, and your first months are not a migration at all, they are building a public presence from scratch.
Patreon trains you to think in tiers: five dollars for this, fifteen for that, fifty for the thing nobody buys. The adult platforms do not work that way. Most of the money on OnlyFans, Fansly or Fanvue arrives as pay-per-view drops, tips and paid messages, and the subscription is just the door fee. Port the tier ladder across unchanged and you will earn less on more work.
Price for the new mechanics instead. A low or free subscription with strong paid messaging behind it usually beats a proud $25 tier with nothing behind it. The catch: income now depends on message volume in a way it never did on Patreon, and the inbox becomes a real job. Some creators staff it with a chat team, some hand the first pass to an AI that answers fan messages automatically so a warm fan is never left waiting overnight.
Then give people a reason that is not "please move". Loyalty does not survive a card form, but a launch window does, and so does a format Patreon never let you publish. Our guide to getting OnlyFans subscribers covers the launch mechanics, and how to start an OnlyFans will save you a week if the new page is empty.
You are not migrating to save money. You are almost certainly migrating to pay more.
| Platform | Cut | Source quality |
|---|---|---|
| Patreon | 10% standard (pages published after August 4, 2025), plus 2.9% + $0.30 processing | Published |
| OnlyFans | 20% of the total fan payment | Published in its terms |
| Fansly | 20% | Reported, not published (terms could not be verified) |
| Fanvue | 20% standard | Published on its legal page |
Patreon's standard cut is 10% plus processing of 2.9% + $0.30. On $1,000 a month, real take-home lands around $770 to $865 depending on tier price ($769.98 at $3 across 333 patrons, $840.75 at $10 across 100 patrons, because the flat 30 cents punishes cheap tiers). OnlyFans publishes 20% in its terms: "Our Fee is calculated as 20% of the total Fan Payment." Fanvue publishes 20% standard. Fansly is widely reported at 20%, and we call that reported rather than published, because we could not verify it in its own terms.
So the adult platforms take more, not less. Anyone selling a migration as a fee saving is not doing the arithmetic. Creators leave Patreon for what they are allowed to publish and how well it sells, and those two things swamp ten points of fee. Patreon bans real-person sex acts even behind the paywall. It bans "Hyperrealistic sexual video, audio, or other works created or accessible for only one fan", killing the customs business outright. It bans sex toys and worn items. It requires every public-facing surface (profile image, banner, tier descriptions, free posts, shop previews) to be clean of nudity. It gives adult pages no native video, blurs previews, and hides them from default discovery.
That is the honest trade: a higher cut, on a platform that lets you sell what actually makes money, to an audience that came to buy it. A 20% cut of a business that works beats a 10% cut of one you are not allowed to run. See OnlyFans vs Patreon, our Patreon alternatives for adult content, and the wider field in OnlyFans alternatives.
We cannot tell you what percentage of your patrons will follow you. There is no published, verifiable benchmark for patron retention across a platform migration, and we will not invent one to make this page feel more useful. If a blog tells you that "creators typically retain 30% to 40% of their supporters", ask where that number came from. It came from nowhere. Someone made it up and everyone copied it.
What we can tell you is how to make the unknown survivable: keep Patreon paused and earning, overlap the platforms, and do not spend money you have not been paid. Plan as though the loss is severe. If it turns out mild, you have a cash buffer, which beats the reverse every time.
The new platform will not find your audience and will not answer your messages at 2am. We do both: we promote where your buyers already gather, price the new offer for the new mechanics, and keep the inbox alive while the old page is still running. You keep your login, your payouts and the large majority of what you earn.
Apply to FansPromo freeIn public, and slowly. Patreon will not export your patrons and forbids you from asking them for contact details, so you move people through your own public channels: social posts, your link-in-bio, and a new offer worth switching for. Pause your Patreon rather than unpublishing it, and run both platforms in parallel for at least a billing cycle or two.
No. Patreon's off-Patreon activity policy explicitly prohibits "Requesting personal contact information from Patreon users, including email addresses, phone numbers, or direct messaging usernames". Any article telling you to email your patron list is telling you to break a published rule that can get your page removed. Build the list on your own public channels instead.
Keep both while you can. Patreon takes 10% and most adult platforms take 20%, so you are not switching to save money, you are switching for what you are allowed to publish and how well it sells. Run them together until the new platform genuinely out-earns the old one, then decide.
You will lose some, and anyone quoting you a specific survival percentage is guessing. There is no published, verifiable benchmark for patron retention across a platform migration. Plan your finances around a large loss, keep Patreon paused rather than deleted, and treat every patron who does move as earned rather than owed.
Yes, and Patreon says so itself. Its guidance for 18+ creators names the permitted external hosting sites: "Vimeo, YouTube, OnlyFans, Podcasting sites/aggregators". You can point people at a public profile. What you cannot do is harvest their contact details or route payments around Patreon's payment tools.
The rule changes, the fee changes, and what finally pushes people out.
RoundupWhere you can actually publish what Patreon bans, compared on fees and reach.
Fees10% plus processing, and what that really leaves you on $1,000 a month.
Captions, bios, DM scripts, tip menus, pricing and more, generated in seconds. No card needed.