Patreon on your own site.

Patreon API v2 (the current major version) uses OAuth 2.0 with the authorization code flow and a small set of well-defined scopes. The most important ones for an embed widget are identity (the basic creator profile), identity[email] (the creator email address, optional), campaigns (your campaign metadata including title, summary, patron count, and pledge sum), campaigns.members (to read patron lists, optional and only used for supporter-wall layouts), campaigns.posts (to read your post archive), and w:campaigns.posts (write scope, only needed if you want to publish posts from your widget, which Poper does not request by default). Older Patreon API v1 widgets relied on personal access tokens scoped to a single campaign, but Patreon strongly recommends API v2 OAuth for any production integration because the v1 endpoints are now legacy and lack the field-level permissioning that powers tier-aware visibility. Poper requests only the read scopes needed to populate your widget and never asks for write permissions unless you explicitly enable a Pro feature like the Schedule Post integration. Access tokens last for one month, refresh tokens last indefinitely until revoked, and the rotation is handled silently by our token service so your widget never goes stale. Tokens are stored encrypted at rest using AES-256, and you can revoke them from your Patreon account settings under Apps and Integrations any time. If a creator only wants to display the public side of someone else's Patreon page (for example, on a fan curation site), the widget can fall back to public-only mode that pulls the same content the patreon.com profile page exposes without any OAuth handshake at all. This dual-mode design means the same widget config powers both creator-owned embeds and curation-style embeds without forcing the user to pick a different product.

Every Patreon post has a visibility setting: public (anyone can read), patrons-only (only paying patrons can read, often gated to a specific minimum tier), or scheduled (not yet live). When the Poper widget syncs your post archive via the API, each post object includes a current_user_can_view field, an access_tier reference, and a published_at timestamp. The widget reads current_user_can_view, and if the value is false (meaning the post is patrons-only and the connected OAuth identity does not have access at the right tier), it renders the post as a locked preview card showing only the title, the publish date, and the access tier required. The actual post body, attached audio, and attached video are never fetched into the browser, so the private content cannot leak even if a determined visitor inspected the network tab in DevTools. This is the same paywall behavior Patreon's own website uses, just on your domain. Some competitor widgets implement this incorrectly by fetching all post content into the browser and then hiding it with CSS, which means a bit of view-source poking or a quick fetch from the JavaScript console exposes the full text. Poper does the gating server-side, before the post body ever touches the browser, by stripping the body field from the API response in our edge function before serving the widget HTML. We also strip embedded media URLs from the post object so a curious visitor cannot deep-link to the unpublished asset on Patreon's CDN. This server-side stripping is the difference between a real paywall and a CSS hide-and-pray paywall, and it is the single most important thing to verify in any third-party Patreon widget.

Most Patreon creators run between two and five tiers, with the typical sweet spot being three. Behavioral pricing research from Dan Ariely and the field of decoy pricing consistently shows that when buyers are presented with three options, the middle option wins disproportionately because it acts as the anchor against the cheap and the premium tiers. On Patreon specifically, the public data Patreon publishes about creator earnings shows that creators with three to four tiers and a clearly highlighted recommended tier earn 40 to 60 percent more per visitor than creators with a single tier or with five-plus tiers and no highlight. The Poper widget exposes a Recommended toggle on every tier so you can pick which one gets a glowing accent ring, a Most Popular badge, and a slightly larger card size. We default the recommendation to your second-cheapest tier (the classic anchor position), but you can override that to spotlight whichever tier you want to push. The widget also supports tier benefits as a structured list rather than a free-text blob, so each benefit gets its own checkmark row that scans in a fraction of a second instead of forcing visitors to read a paragraph. Tier currency follows your Patreon campaign setting (USD, EUR, GBP, AUD, CAD, JPY, BRL, MXN, and a dozen others), so a creator running a euro-denominated campaign sees euro amounts instead of converted USD. Pledge frequency is also surfaced (monthly versus per-creation), which matters because per-creation tiers convert very differently from monthly tiers and visitors should see that distinction up front.

There are two distinct embed use cases for a Patreon widget. The first: you are the creator, you have an active Patreon campaign, and you want to embed your own tiers and posts on your own creator website to convert organic traffic into paying patrons. For this case you sign in via OAuth, get the full creator view including paid-tier visibility logic, the recommended-tier highlight, the supporter wall layout, and the member-aware embed mode where signed-in patrons see full post bodies on your domain. The second: you run a curation site, a community page, a podcast network site, or a fan blog and you want to feature one or more public Patreon creators without authenticating as them. For this case Poper offers a Public-Only mode that pulls only the public-facing content (creator name, bio, public-post archive, public tier list, and the visible supporter count) using the same routes as patreon.com itself. This second mode is what powers fan-curation sites that round up the best webcomic creators on Patreon, podcast networks that feature member shows from their roster, and aggregator sites that list creators by genre or interest. Public-only mode obviously cannot show member-aware paywall logic (because there is no logged-in patron context to check against), but it can still link directly to the join flow for each tier so a visitor who discovers a creator through your curation site can pledge in two clicks. The dual-mode design is unique among Patreon widgets; most competitor tools force you to pick one mode or the other at install time, which means a multi-creator network site has to maintain two different embed codes and two different builder flows.

Patreon is the original membership platform but no longer the only one. Ko-fi positions itself as the free alternative with a simple tip jar and optional Gold membership for $6 a month flat (with 0 percent platform fee on tips, only payment processing). Substack pivoted from email newsletters into full membership and podcast hosting and takes 10 percent plus payment fees on paid subscriptions, with a strong bias toward written and audio content. Buy Me a Coffee blends one-off tipping with monthly memberships and takes 5 percent, popular among visual creators and one-person businesses. Gumroad takes a flat 10 percent on digital product sales and is best suited for one-time purchases rather than recurring memberships. Patreon itself takes 8 percent on its Pro plan and 12 percent on Premium plus payment processing fees of about 2.9 percent plus $0.30 per transaction, but offers the deepest tier and post tooling, the best mobile app for creators, and a dedicated creator success team for accounts above a certain threshold. The choice between platforms is largely about audience expectation (writers tend toward Substack, podcasters and YouTubers toward Patreon, visual artists toward Ko-fi or Buy Me a Coffee, digital-product creators toward Gumroad) and feature mix (Patreon has the deepest tier and post tooling, Substack has the best email and podcast publishing, Ko-fi the lowest fees, Buy Me a Coffee the simplest one-off-tip flow). The Poper widget supports embedding from Patreon out of the box, with sister widgets for Ko-fi, Buy Me a Coffee, Gumroad, and Substack so creators who want to feature multiple monetization channels on one site can do so without juggling four different embed codes from four different vendors. This makes Poper the closest thing to a unified creator-monetization embed layer for the open web. For most creators, the right answer is to pick one primary platform (usually Patreon for tier-heavy memberships, Substack for newsletter-heavy memberships, Ko-fi for tip-heavy support) and use the secondary widgets for opportunistic surfaces like a one-off tip jar at the bottom of a viral blog post or a single-product Gumroad embed for a special release.