He Gave Away Free Posts Inside the Paywall. Patreon Says It Brought Him 840 Members.

Matthew Wills sells a membership. Then he started posting for free, on the same platform, outside the paywall — and Patreon says it worked hard enough to write a case study about it.

The number in the headline of that case study: 840 new members in three months, attributed to Quips.

Wills is the creator of SWORDS: The Webcomic, its companion card game SWORDS: CUT THE DECK and STARS: The Webcomic, with a page that lets fans join free for weekly digests or pay to become a full member. Paid tiers start at $1/month. He's a cartoonist from Wellington, New Zealand.

The format

Quips are short-form posts Patreon describes as free posts that live in the Home feed and reach fans across its app and website. They're public by default and must stay that way — that's what makes them discoverable, and they surface to fans who don't know you yet. A Join button sits directly on the Quip in the feed, so a fan can become a free member without leaving the scroll.

One caveat most write-ups skip: Quips don't appear in the desktop feed. This is a phone mechanic.

What Patreon says worked

The examples are unglamorous. An introduction Quip — a plain pitch for the page — brought in more than 50 new members. An edited comic panel with a tongue-in-cheek message telling people to follow him free and pay later brought 40, and Wills says it worked because "it showcased a little bit of my art and dry New Zealand humour."

Then there's the one that reached furthest: a before-and-after glimpse of his workspace, seen by more than 30,000 fans in the feed.

A desk photo. Not a funnel.

Why the feed suddenly favours smaller pages

In August, Patreon changed the machinery. Its recommendation system used to hunt for creators similar to ones a user already liked, which tended to favour larger creators; now discovery leans on comparing an individual post to other posts by topic and craft. Post-level matching gives a small page with one strong post a shot that account-level matching never did.

Patreon CEO Jack Conte has framed the whole push bluntly: "I feel like we're competing with what Instagram should have and could have become, but did not."

Read the numbers like a marketer

Everything above is Patreon's reporting on Patreon, published in a marketing post, unaudited. The same post claims creators using Quips saw more than 50% growth in new memberships compared with the previous month, and the company says its network is delivering over 1 million new members per month to creators. Treat those as vendor figures.

The mechanic is the part worth stealing. A membership platform is now paying out organic reach for free content posted inside the billing platform itself — the place most knowledge sellers treat as a checkout page and nothing else. The free tier used to live on Instagram. It's moving in-house.