My understanding is even a blank published creator account is enough to be grandfathered in. No verification yet though.

Yeah, this makes too much sense. In a way, I think this is already one such move; "Lite" is going to be unattractive to most people, they might as well just go with Ko-fi and not lose 5% of every tip, and the +3% fee increase for Pro is going to hurt those smaller donations most. It almost feels like one of their biggest goals here is to discourage new users who don't already have an audience, and to discourage donators who only want to donate a little, since why would they want to pay a dollar for only about $.75 to actually make it to the person they're wanting to support?

The problem is there's not that many good alternatives to Patreon. The only thing I can think of is Ko-fi, honestly, and even that's not the best option for newbies because it started off as a tip jar service first, and to get the ability to let people make monthly pledges and access "supporter-only posts" and other basic-for-now Patreon things you have to join Ko-fi Gold for $6 per month. Drip doesn't seem to be open to anyone without an invite and they already seem to be going "we're going to be abandoning Drip, we're partnering with another company to make something different in a bit" so I'm kind of leery of that. While both sther and commiss.io look really interesting, but not many people seem to know about them... And SubscribeStar keeps getting brought up as an alternative, but I've not heard about that, either.

Does anyone know of any good alternatives to Patreon, or have experience with any of the listed platforms? I did make sure to have my Patreon set up so I can get grandfathered in, but I'm worried they'll keep making changes that'll make it necessary to jump ship. Hell, would itch.io ever be willing to set something Patreon-like up on the site where users can pledge to creators and get early access to games, access to private posts, extras, etc?