Patreon is expanding its suite of tools for digital creators. While monthly fan subscriptions are Patreon's bread and butter, later this year, it will offer one-off digital goods and free subscriptions to consumers.

"The free-to-paid conversion path is pretty effective," said Patreon's chief product officer, Julian Gutman. He perceives the free-subscription product as beneficial to creators so that they can, then, use their subscription list as a type of newsletter or way to just reach all of their biggest fans at once. And hopefully, getting fans into a free membership community will encourage them to make a monthly pledge. As always, creators can choose which perks they want to offer for each tier of membership.

"Creators can actually know who their fans are, have their superfans in one place and have the ability to post something and know it's going to reach them," Gutman told TechCrunch.

Patreon's leadership has been vocal about how algorithmically generated content feeds can sometimes hurt creators. Sure, the mysterious TikTok algorithm can work wonders, bringing creators to a wide audience beyond their wildest dreams. But once a creator invests in that audience, it's impossible to tell whether or not their fans are actually seeing the posts they create. This tension finally came to a head last year, when Instagram fell under intense scrutiny for aggressively promoting algorithmic curation. Users saw fewer posts from people they actually follow, which posed some serious concerns for creators' ability to reach fans.

Conte told TechCrunch at the time: "Instagram has a deep choice to make. Are we building a place where people can build deep, intimate, lasting relationships with each other? Or are we building this top-of-funnel, mass media, algorithmic curation platform?"

By providing free membership, Patreon hopes to enable creators to access their fans more easily, even those who aren't paying for bonus goodies. New e-commerce shops on Patreon also make the lives of creators easier -- rather than sending fans off to other platforms, they can simply sell stuff like bonus podcasts, videos, music, or writing directly off their Patreon page. Many times, that bonus material is part of the creator's existing paid membership, and selling it outside of that membership probably devalues it. However, as Gutman suggests, in his opinion, such a feature as one-time shopping may become an alternative, to support converting one-time e-commerce shoppers into lifelong month-to-month subscribers. And for the creators, sustainable monthly income is more important than anything.

The service will take 5% of the sale, on top of tax and payment processing fees, on e-commerce transactions; that's lower than the cut Patreon takes from subscriptions, which starts around 8%. Creators can now sign up to join the waitlist for access to those features, which are expected to roll out more broadly later this year.