There are patreon competitors. Just none of them have a pay by work feature. Consumers likely prefer a predictable expense so there isn't that much of a demand to do it that way.
> Part of what made Patreon explosively successful, in the first place, was that Patreon had apparently cracked the code on one of the hardest problems on the internet: micropayments.
> By the time Patreon had come along people had been discussing the problem of micropayments on the internet for at least two decades.
I guess the author missed the years where Flattr buttons were popping up on every website, blog, and even comment ?
Flattr 1.0 seems to have been killed by a combination of the 2013 Twitter APIpocalypse, being €-first, and not being based in the Silicon Valley :
https://blog.hsnyc.co/post/flattr-works/
https://thenextweb.com/news/flattr-twitter-payments-ban
Then Flattr 2.0 tried again :
https://www.engadget.com/2017-10-24-adblock-plus-relaunches-...
And I doubt that Flattr was even the first to do the "bundling" trick, heck this is probably also what made the Minitel so successful ?
But as you can see it works in the opposite way : the patrons set a specific sum of money to be distributed each month, which then gets redistributed depending on their engagement with some or other creator (which you can decide to manually boost).
I mean I sure did. When Flattr was announced I loved the idea, and promised that I'd sign up the second I saw a flattr button on a blog post I liked.
I never once saw a Flattr button outside of brokep's own blog.